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Western Digital Ships World’s Most Capacious Hard Drive for Notebooks.

WD Leaves Fujitsu Behind with 250GB Mobile Hard Disk Drive

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 05/22/2007 | 08:34 AM ]

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Major maker of hard disk drives, Western Digital Corp., said it had begun to ship hard disk drives (HDD) for mobile computers or consumer electronics with 250GB capacity, leaving behind Fujitsu, who promised to start shipping similar hard disk drive only later this year.

The new Scorpio hard drive in 2.5” form-factor is based on two platters with perpendicular recording technology, uses 5400rpm motor, has 8MB of cache and features Serial ATA-150 interface. According to WD, Scorpio 250GB has 4.20ms average latency, 12ms read seek time latency and 2.0ms track-to-track seek time.

The new model, just as other contemporary Scorpio HDDs, features WD proprietary technology WhisperDrive, which makes the drive quiet, use less power and run at cool operating temperatures. In addition, the new hard drive supports ShockGuard and IntelliSeek.

"The 2.5” market continues to be a major focus for WD, and this 250GB WD Scorpio drive represents our second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording platform. The WD Scorpio 250 GB hard drive is a direct result of the significant investments WD has made in proprietary head technologies as well as significant system level feature innovation,” said Jim Morris, WD's vice president and general manager of notebook storage.

According to market research firm IDC, adoption of PMR technology in mobile 2.5” hard drives will sustain an increase in the average capacity shipped close to the average growth rate of 32% for the past five years. The firm states that by 2011, shipments of mobile 2.5” hard drives will more than double 2006 shipment volumes.