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Western Digital Ships Industry’s First Mobile Hard Drive with 320GB Capacity.

WD Begins Shipments of 320GB Mobile Hard Disk Drive

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 10/31/2007 | 12:50 PM ]

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Western Digital, a leading producer of hard disk drives, on Wednesday said it had begun shipping its 320GB hard disk drive (HDD) in 2.5” form-factor aimed at mobile and small form-factor. The move makes Western Digital the first provider of industry-leading 320GB mobile hard drive and also one of the first companies to take advantage of 160GB platters.

“In today’s market, new notebook systems are increasingly targeting heavy duty applications in the office and home. As system manufacturers improve performance and add data hungry features, high-capacity hard drives become a key ingredient that allows users to fully benefit from the latest computing technologies,” said Jim Morris, WD’s vice president and general manager of notebook storage.

WD Scorpio 320GB features 5400rpm spindle speed, 8MB of cache and Serial ATA-300 interconnection. The manufacturer declares 4.20ms average latency, 12ms read seek time, 2.0ms track-to-track seek time as well as 850Mb/s buffer to disk transfer rate. The new mobile HDD consumes 2.5W during reads/writes, 2W in idle mode, 0.25W in standby mode and 0.1W in sleep mode.

Like all WD mobile hard drives, the Scorpio 320GB supports such technologies as IntelliSeek, ShockGuard and WhisperDrive.

WD Scorpio 320 GB drives (model WD3200BEVS) are available on the company’s online store. Several notebook makers, such as Acer, are planning to equip their laptops with the new mobile hard drive.