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Western Digital Announces 1TB Mobile HD 252

Western Digital has announced a couple of new 2.5-inch mobile hard drives weighing in at 750GB and 1TB. The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate and Western Digital's "WhisperDrive" tech along with specialized shock tolerance and head parking to ensure durability. "Both models are shipping now through various channels; the 1TB model is currently available in My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The Scorpio Blue 750GB model has a suggested sticker price of $190 while the Scorpio Blue 1TB is a mere $250. The My Passport Essential SE 1 TB portable drive is $299.99 USD and the 750 GB model is $199.99 USD."
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Western Digital Announces 1TB Mobile HD

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  • by the_humeister ( 922869 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:29PM (#28843979)

    to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.

    • by TuaAmin13 ( 1359435 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:48PM (#28844241)
      Except this is a 12.5mm height drive. The PS3 uses a thinner drive.
    • to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.

      Maybe not. According to an article [eweek.com] on eWeek it's height is 12.5mm. The PS3 probably has more clearance than most if not all laptops so it may fit in. I was hoping it'd fit in my MacBook Pro but I doubt it. And the thing is is I replaced the 160 GB HDD my MBP came with with the biggest drive I could find for it a 320 GB drive a few months ago.

      About all the drives are good for is USB or Firewire, however I already have a 1.5 TB external drive.

      Falcon

    • by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @11:12PM (#28847547) Journal

      Having just had to deal with a string of bad 1 TB+ size Seagate drives going bad (100% failure rate in 6 months, baby!) and switching to WD with good results, I have to say that I hope WD keeps up their good name.

      I tend to find that none of the manufacturers are consistently better or worse than the others. Seagate has a good line of firmware, and for a year or two their drives are excellent and reliable. They they go sour and it's a good idea to switch to somebody else for a while. They go off and on, back and forth. For the past few years I've steered towards Seagate. Now, I'm a WD fan. I've loved Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, Fujitsu, Conner, and Micropolis. (remember them?)

      All have had their good runs and bad runs. Some of the bad runs killed the company. (eg: IBM's Desk-star "death-star" line)

      Go WD!

  • by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:31PM (#28844003) Journal
    The plan: Get one of these TB drives and stuff it full of FLAC rips from my massive CD collection. Then USB it to a WD TV box [wdc.com] and my cheapy $80 15in flat panel monitor, routing the audio to my insane audio system.

    Finally: Done.

    • by ODiV ( 51631 )

      If it's just sitting there, why use a more expensive 2.5" drive?

      • elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.
        • by Facegarden ( 967477 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @05:00PM (#28844427)

          elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.

          Really? Really....? You really think they say it works best with THEIR drives for any reason other than to make you think you should buy their drives? It's just marketing fluff, like when Kraft Mac and Cheese says it tastes great with Kraft Parmesan cheese on top, as if any other Parmesan cheese isn't going to provide the same taste sensation.
          -Taylor

          • by karnal ( 22275 )

            Four words: Specially Activated Flavour Crystals (tm)

          • by teg ( 97890 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @05:37PM (#28844827)

            ... Kraft Parmesan cheese ...

            There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese [wikipedia.org]. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

            • ... Kraft Parmesan cheese ...

              There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese [wikipedia.org]. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

              Actually that's exactly what they call it. They don't call it Parmigiano-Reggiano, but they do call it Parmesan.

              http://www.indojin.com/shop-online/catalog/images/kraft-parmesan.gif [indojin.com]

              Of course it's almost nothing like good Parmigiano-Reggiano, but if we're being pedantic, you are wrong in saying there is no "Kraft Parmesan", even if they are wrong in calling it that.

              -Taylor

            • by Kaboom13 ( 235759 ) <kaboom108&bellsouth,net> on Monday July 27, 2009 @07:11PM (#28845671)

              Exactly, I hate when the Plebians call things based on what they look like, taste like, and are manufactured in identical processes too, instead of where they were made! Indeed the other day I saw a man in the deli order a sandwich! How absurd, as if you could get a layered meat and bread product assembled in Sandwich, in the Kent region of England, in a deli in the United States. I politely tried to correct him, but he persisted in his error, and after my repeated attempts, told me to "Shut-up and fuck off".

          • by Penguinshit ( 591885 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @06:36PM (#28845329) Homepage Journal
            Mac-N-Cheese is made with cheddar. Using parmesan would result in a bowl of pasta vomit. Every cheese has a proper usage.
  • by religious freak ( 1005821 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:34PM (#28844059)
    I've loved IT for decades, and this level of data storage still boggles my mind. At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???

    I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      You're forgetting about BluRay, up to 50 GB per movie, granted not everyone needs all the extra audio and whatnot so you can probably trim a few GBs here and there.
    • I've loved IT for decades, and this level of data storage still boggles my mind. At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???

      I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!

      Yeah, I was just thinking of that last week. If you read the Wikipedia Entries on Petabytes and Exabytes, and Zettabytes it really starts to make you wonder what we will be using all that space for. On 50 meg drives it was more space for documents, then a couple of gigs and you had just enough space for all your music. On Terabyte drives you can store lots and lots of BluRay rips, something we didn't even think about ten years ago. A good movie collection might still be a few TB though. Beyond that though,

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bemymonkey ( 1244086 )

      Hmmm... let's see. I've got about a terabyte of stuff that I've accumulated over the years. Every CD/DVD/Video cassette I've ever bought or borrowed from a friend has been digitized, reencoded and written to a hard drive. That's 100-300 MB per CD and somewhere between 700 and 8000MB per movie. Over the years, I'm up to a 120GB music collection and 800+GB of video... _without_ downloading a single one. If you're a pack rat, you'll fill a terabyte pretty easily, even with legal means :)

      If I'd downloaded and k

      • by karnal ( 22275 )

        Borrowing a DVD from a friend and ripping it is the same as pirating it.

        *note - I'm not attempting to throw stones here, just stating a point that just because you haven't downloaded a single one, doesn't mean you are better than everyone else who has.

    • At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???

      And you know what... The Exchange Administrators still only give 50mb for your mailbox 10 years later. ;)

      Seriously, what is up with that... My home computer has more hard drive space than many business servers combined.

      • Whilst data density has kept increasing, data transfer rates have not. Even doing an offline defrag or repair on a 10GB Exchange store is going to piss of a lot of people for a good few hours at least. What happens when your exchange store is 500GB and hosts 1000 users mailboxes and something goes wrong?

        Also backup systems haven't kept up either, backing all that data up is another problem entirely

      • And you know what... The Exchange Administrators still only give 50mb for your mailbox 10 years later. ;)

        Seriously, what is up with that... My home computer has more hard drive space than many business servers combined.


        Your home PC has to store 1 persons stuff, and you personally can sport the money for you. Should the company provide a terabyte per person? Why? You're not storing dozens and dozens of movies on the office server. 1 movie = several thousand emails/spreadsheets/text documents.
        • I won't be able to win if I argue with you :)

          If I say: well if 6 people send me each a 10MB file then I'll be over quota

          you will probably say: email is not for sending big files, you should use "blah"

          I will counter that it's the most convenient way for off-network or off-company people to send me the files

          But you will say this is abuse of email and if you were my sys admin, you would hurt me.

          Then I will say technology is here to serve me not so I conform to it and if everything was used for its original pur

          • I won't be able to win if I argue with you :)

            If I say: well if 6 people send me each a 10MB file then I'll be over quota


            Trust me...I hate this crap too. Managing not only my space, but also managing what other people send me. But no matter how much space on the mail server is granted, someone will bitch about it.
      • Exchange Server Standard is limited to 75GB for the message store. When the size of the entire mailbox store exceeds 75GB, you have to upgrade to Exchange Server Enteprise, which means more money and (if I'm not mistaken) rebuying your per-seat licensing as well. Large customers can save money by cramming more users into that 75GB.
    • by Compuser ( 14899 )

      First, we will see purists who say they want to store movies uncompressed. That's about a terabyte per movie. So your typical movie collection (including your kids' movies and movies of your kids and movies of your friends' kids and a bunch of stuff listed on IMDB - that's easily a petabyte. Then you figure we'll need 16-bit color, and 10Kx10K resolution and you are easily in the exabyte range. Then you add third dimension and you add another four zeros. Etc.

      I have said this before and I will say this again

  • I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?

    it's the same thing with iPods. the 30 GB model I had was enough to put all my music there, but I only listened to a small subset of it, nothing that a cell phone with a 4 GB couldn't handle.

    so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?

    then, at home just load and unload what you need, and that's it.

    • by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:49PM (#28844253) Homepage Journal

      Imagine being a photographer on the Paris-Dakar race [wikipedia.org] where you're shooting hundreds (thousands?) of photos on a high-res DSLR for three weeks (a week before hand, the race, the aftermath) out in the field. There are a ton of week long sailing races [flickr.com] that any one photographer might blow through 1000 photos a day. Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute. How many hours of video could national geographic tape with just three of these in the field with a MacBook Pro? Lots of options for pros. Consumers will buy these but rarely use them to their potential.

      • by R2.0 ( 532027 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:56PM (#28844351)

        "Imagine being a photographer on the Paris-Dakar race where you're shooting hundreds (thousands?) of photos on a high-res DSLR for three weeks (a week before hand, the race, the aftermath) out in the field. There are a ton of week long sailing races that any one photographer might blow through 1000 photos a day. Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute. How many hours of video could national geographic tape with just three of these in the field with a MacBook Pro? Lots of options for pros. Consumers will buy these but rarely use them to their potential."

        And then he drops something the size of a cigarette pack into the drink or into the sand and it's all gone. They need to make sure they buy 2.

        • Conversely, he can carry 15 somethings the size of a cigarrette pack with him exceedingly easily where that would be untenable before, especially given power requirements.
        • And then he drops something the size of a cigarette pack into the drink or into the sand and it's all gone. They need to make sure they buy 2.

          Not a problem.

          This is a business where a Nikon lens can set you back $5-$10,000, easy - and the $30,000 lens isn't unknown. Sigma Ultra-Telephoto Lens [amazon.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nine-times ( 778537 )

        Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute.

        Is that right? I thought completely uncompressed 1080p was supposed to be something like 3Gbps. Looking at the wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

        The movie industry has embraced 1080p24 as a digital mastering format in both native 24p form and in 24PsF form.... For live broadcast applications, a high-definition progressive scan format operating at 1080p at 50 or 60 frames per second is currently being evaluated... as it has doubled the data rate of current 50 or 60 fields interlaced 1920 Ã-- 1080 from 1.485 Gbit/s to nomin

        • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

          I googled h.264 gb per second storage and 1gb/sec was the 8th result or so. I make no claims to it's accuracy. Its a good, round ballpark number though.

          fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital". The only plus right now of getting rid of film is financial and economical reas

          • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @08:52PM (#28846545) Homepage

            fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital".

            I don't have the sources now but it was a study on resolution in theaters. Basically a good master negative of a film can have 1500-2000 lines of resolution, but even the best analog cinema prints had only 800-1000 lines of resolution. So digital 1080p movies on digital screens are no worse than before. However, analog film directly scanned to digital is very impressive and probably needs a 4096x2048 (4K) camera to match. Fortunately things are progressing fast and the RED Scarlet coming this year should bring 3K to the 3000$ mark and 4K below 10000$. Compared to all the other costs, that's not much. Hell, even 9K IMAX should drop below 50000$ this year. Personally I'm most impressed with the prosonsumer cams though, it's amazing what they pack in a small HD camera and it gets better every year.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @06:37PM (#28845339) Homepage

          3 Gbps = uncompressed 1080p60 video, used for high-end interconnects and such. Recordings are almost always made compressed, even in professional cameras. AVCHD has a maximum of 24 Mbps = 180MB/minute, there's probably more exotic format for huge movie production cameras but even cameras in the 2000$-5000$ range use AVCHD since it takes a helluva camera to capture more detail than that. The rest is basicly to avoid generational loss so a pipeline looks like:

          Camera -> (lossy) -> RAW -> (lossless editing, filtering, special effects etc.) -> Movie -> (lossy) -> final encode for consumer.

          You may think it sounds a lot but video compresses very, very well along in the x, y and time axis. In fact, the better the camera the better it usually compresses because everything is clean while noisy, grainy and flickery video eats bandwidth like crazy. I guess if you're shooting staged movie shots with tons of explosions you'll hook up the camera via one of these 3 Gbps interconnects to a real storage kit and save it uncompressed directly, but then you'll need something much faster than this disk anyway.

          On a related note, a lot of the videos today are basicly just "filling out the disk" of a BluRay, they don't have that amount of detail. You can tell when there's 1080p reencodes that you need a magnifying class to tell is a reencode. At BluRay sizes we should have had 2160p video instead, you'd get much more detail for 50GB - not that many can tell anyway. So you don't really need all that much space except when you're working with uncompressed intermediaries, but that's what the huge workstations with attached SANs are for.

          • 3Gb/sec is the SATA interface speed. There's no way in hell the spinning disk will give you 3Gb/sec.

            • by Kjella ( 173770 )

              The comment I replied to said HD was 3 Gbps, he said that because HD-SDI/3G-SDI [wikipedia.org] is 3 Gbps and that was the interface I was talking about throughout my post. High-end equipment will have those to handle raw HD in realtime. I probably should have spelled that out in a post where it could be confused with the SATA 3Gbps interface.

    • so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?

      But making smaller, more energy efficient disks also mean that it's easier to fit bigger, higher capacity disks into the same packaging. It's part of the same deal.

      I mean, yes, I agree with what you're saying. Putting this drive in my laptop would be overkill. My laptop is currently only using 25 GB. But the nice thing about having lots of different options is everyone can get what they want. With the new flash-based notebook drives, I can get a small, fast, energy-efficient drive, and with this relea

    • I have the same thought.

      When I bought my MSI Wind, I decided to upgrade the HDD to a 320GB merely because I wanted the faster 7200rpm and because it was fairly cheap. I then put the old drive in my PS3 so it didn't go to waste. The old drive from the PS3 is now my OS drive for my Media Center.

      I think with all of my utilities and OS it's taking up maybe 6GB? There's probably some music on there, too.

      I keep all of my media on my Media Center and that is because its in my living room. Music, TV Shows, Movies,

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by orev ( 71566 )

      Some of us don't enjoy having our data spread out all over the place on multiple systems with multiple drives. I don't want to have to worry about if I'm going to want some file while I'm traveling, so why not just take everything? That's what these allow people to do.

      • I like spreading my data out, keeping it in different places, redundantly. And the My Passport form factor fits in a bank safe deposit drawer with lots of room to spare.

    • by FleaPlus ( 6935 )

      I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?

      I actually use my MSI Wind netbook as more-or-less my primary machine nowadays. The main problem I had with the netbook is the lack of a DVD drive, so my solution was to just spend $100 for a 500GB 2.5" hard drive and copy images of every DVD I own to it. I take my netbook almost everywhere since it's so light, and it's quite handy to be able to show any movie from my collection whenever I'm at a friend's place. It's also been handy for offloading several gigabytes worth of photos/videos from my digital cam

  • Roughly two 2.5" drives fit in the space of a 3.5" drive (using common adapters). So with a standard two-drive 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (such as a Bay Rafter), you can now have 2TB with 2.5" or 3.5" drives as your choice.

    What might this be useful for? It would reduce the space needed for a RAID-5 array. For example, you could have four drives in two 3.5" slots, running in RAID-5, 3TB usable. With desktop drives, you could at best do RAID-1 with 2TB usable.

    It also potentially could have performance benefits. It'

    • by ameline ( 771895 )

      It actually is clear -- it is 5200rpm, 12ms seek, 8MB buffer.

      (at least it is clear if you download the spec sheets from WD)

      • by Barny ( 103770 )

        Which is why I will stick to my seagate 7200RPM 500G drive :)

        WD pulled the same thing when they launched their 2TB 3.5" drives, they all originally came out as "green" drives, which means 5200rpm spindle speed.

  • Yes, now laptop computers can have a whole terabyte to get bashed around, lost and stolen! Yeah!

    No, seriously it's Sweet Zombie Jesus level of coolness. Really.

  • Reliability? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:40PM (#28844133) Homepage Journal

    That's a lot of bits and bytes in a very small space... what's the expected Real Life Span of one of those? I mean it would make a great backup solution, but would you really trust it over (or at least on par with) say, a 3.5" 1TB internal hard drive? Most people I know use these to backup their photos/home movies (pirated media's not worth backing up in most cases, and can be had for free more or less instantly nowadays with BT; home movies are only archived on one computer typically).
     
    Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive much larger than 300GB for long term data storage.

    • I don't knob who steals media on the high seas?

      But when you *download* media from the net, there are many rare things to keep. Some of them so valuable, that you might never ever see anyone on this planet have it again.

      I own music that there are only 7 pressed vinyls of on the whole planet. I own videos of rare events that you can't get off the net at any chance.
      I own movies in full-hd, with german and enlish ac3 streams, two comment streams and full chapters. Try to find something like that on the net.

      Beli

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )

      Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive much larger than 300GB for long term data storage.

      Why the arbitrary figure? On every announcement of a new drive size, people always wonder about the reliability because of the seemingly huge size. I recall this being said about 1GB drives, and now we're at 2k times that size.

      I really can't say I've seen a reliability difference based on differences newness of the drive or the absolute capacity. If you're not backing up, you're risking the loss of your data, regardless of the size of the hard drive. It doesn't even have to be drive failure. What if yo

      • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        300 gb = less platters = less moving parts = less points of failure. A 1tb drive might use 4 250gb platters, but a 300gb drive might use 2 250 gb platters and be artificially limited to 300gb. That's not exactly how it works, but I'm too lazy to look up what size platters WD uses these days and how many are in each drive. Smaller drives tend to use newer technology but with fewer platters to save money (again, = less moving parts). 80gb drives typically only have one platter which is about as small as platt

    • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

      --I'm definitely with you on that. I haven't bought *anything* higher than a 320GB SATA drive because that's the maximum amount of data that I'm comfortable trusting to a single drive/unit. If it starts going bad, I have enough free space to copy it over somewhere else until the replacement arrives.

  • So hard drive technology has not yet reached it's brick wall. It's good to see that the miniature sized drives also getting huge capacities and are quite affordable. Now, if only SSD's would catch up with larger capacities and more importantly, less stratospheric prices.

    As for speed, my WD passport USB2 pocket drive is fast enough to play back full HD video without dropping frames, so there's no speed problems there. Now if only the eeePC had a faster processor.....

    • Have you studied up on the new Intel X25-M G2 drives? Apparently they're nice and fast, and the G2 drives are much cheaper than the G1 drives. Still not cheap, but getting there.
  • Transfer rate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mad Merlin ( 837387 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:44PM (#28844197) Homepage

    The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate...

    Read: The drives feature a SATA 2 interface, which has a theoretical maximum of 3 Gigabits/s transfer rate, while in practice you'll get 1/4th of that if you're lucky.

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Got any data to back that up?

    • Re:Transfer rate (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @05:25PM (#28844697) Homepage

      And don't forget that's 3Gbit/s in 10 bit encoding with two parity bits, so you'll at most get 300MB/s. From cache you can get fairly close to that but reading from platters is slower, couldn't find any info on actual sequential read/write speeds.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Barny ( 103770 )

        Of course not, they were very good at hiding the fact that their "green" desktop drives are really just 5400RPM drives, they even obfuscated it from their own datasheets.

        As an interesting note, the new line of Patriot SSD come very close to the 300MB/s speed, clocking in 280MB/s in reads.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          As an interesting note, the new line of Patriot SSD come very close to the 300MB/s speed, clocking in 280MB/s in reads.

          Yep, the next step up seems to be PCI express cards directly, even with SATA3 on the horizon it's not moving fast enough. For example the OCZ Z-Drive [ocztechnology.com]. These are basicly just internally RAID'd SSDs but a preview of what's to come.

          • Yep, the next step up seems to be PCI express cards directly,

            Shazam! [runcore.com]

            Hype aside I really like the runcore products. Especially the PCIe units with the USB header for cloning your drive.
    • Also, the transfer rate is usually the rate of the interface, not of the disk itself. Which usually is just a fraction of that.

    • then I'll buy it...
  • Excellent! (Score:5, Funny)

    by cashman73 ( 855518 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @04:49PM (#28844245) Journal
    So now, we'll not only be able to store CowboyNeal's entire porn collection on one disk, but have a cheap second disk to store CowboyNeal's entire personality and consciousness! He's going to be like, immortal, or something,... ;-) The only question is, WHY in the hell would we want to do that?!?!
  • A 5400 RPM drive of this size should have twice the data transfer of drives that are currently available (500GB). In fact, this should have 10x the throughput of my current laptop drive. I'm drooling already...

    Obviously, this only applies to sequential reads/writes. Is there any other bottleneck, or can I actually expect to write large files 10x faster?

  • ...oh give me a break. Like 1TB on a laptop is gonna be used for Word Docs or "official business"...Please.

    • Some people shoot home movies. Lots of home movies. Then they edit the movies and upload them to YouTube or Vimeo or somewhere similar. But get this: YouTube doesn't allow porn.

      • Some people shoot home movies. Lots of home movies. Then they edit the movies and upload them to YouTube or Vimeo or somewhere similar. But get this: YouTube doesn't allow porn.

        Some people shoot home movies. Lots of them, even some of them in 1080p HD format, consuming hundreds of Gigabytes of space.

        Then they upload them to YouTube or Vimeo where they're compressed down to the same shitty format my 5-dollar playskool webcam can produce.

        Yeah, you're absolutely right. YouTube sure as hell ain't porn. The quality sucks too bad.

    • 2 and a half inches doesn't get you into the porn business.

      Believe me I've tried.

  • by diamondsw ( 685967 ) on Monday July 27, 2009 @05:06PM (#28844483)

    These are 12.5mm drives. The VAST majority of laptops from the last several years (certainly any new enough to have a SATA interface) only allow for 9.5mm drives. I'm sure there's some Alienware rig that's large enough to take them, but chances are your laptop will not.

    This is a marketing stunt to say "we're first", even though it won't be usable for most people.

  • they will switch their giant power-hungry 3.5" external drive models like the 2TB Mirror edition to this drive to conserve both power and space.

    The mirror edition is a friggin' brick and a half!

  • I must admit that this capacity is attractive in that form factor but 320GB is about as big as I "need" really... actually bigger than I need. The last time I was deciding on a new drive for my latest Fedora install (I always install fresh and mount the old drive into a USB case for data recovery), I decided that while the price of a 500GB drive was within the "affordable" window, the lower price of the current high performance 320GB drives was quite attractive and at the same time was more than adequate f

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It raises some interesting possibilities and questions. A person could theoretically be assured of never forgetting anything. Of course, there is also the question of whether one would really want their entire life recorded.

      I like your idea, but I want an off switch. If I wanted to see a POV masturbation of myself I would just go do it.

    • Most of the images and videos people take now, of what they think is important are exceedingly dull to watch.

      Recording everything would be several orders of magnitude worse.
      As far as never forgetting, would one record oneself reviewing his own recording, to "remember" something? I can see it now...

      "There was that time I was reviewing MyLife(tm), trying to find my car keys, and I found them in the septic tank... funny story that." But it was really hilarious, when I was watching my watch the found-my
  • So for the smaller form factor and fancy enclosure, you get half the capacity of a 3.5" drive and pay an extra cost that scales with the capacity of the 2.5" drive. Maybe this isn't 100% accurate, but this seems to hold true for my search of caviar and passport drive sizes 250GB-2TB, and is easier for me to explain. I have no issue with the cost, and I will gladly continue to buy WD drives as I feel they make the superior hardware. What I do have though is a hard enough time answering a million questions

Your own mileage may vary.

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