WD pushes out super-slim shock-resistant Ultrabook drive
Single platter
Western Digital has crafted up a slim half-terabyte single platter drive that uses the least power of all Ultrabook disk drive on the market. WD says it is also the most shock-resistant Ultrabook drive yet.
The 6.8mm thin Scorpio Blue comes in 320GB and 500GB capacities, spins at 5,400rpm and has a 4000Gs operating shock tolerance. The 500GB model draws 1.4 watts when reading or writing, 0.55 watts in idle mode, and 0.13 watts in standby and sleep modes.
Seagate's single-platter Momentus Thin drives come in 160GB, 250GB and 320GB capacities, so WD has a higher capacity drive. The Momentus Thins have a 16MB cache, the Scorpio Blue thins having an 8MB one, and both the Seagate and WD drives use a 3Gbit/sSATA interface. Seagate says the Momentus Thin can stream data at up to 300GB/sec; WD doesn't provide a streaming data figure.
Hitachi GST – WD's now delayed hard-drive spouse – has a single platter Travelstar Z5K5000 storing 250GB, 320GB and 500GB, spinning at 5,400rpm, and with an 8MB cache and 3Gbit/s SATA interface. Wow, it looks like a potential second source for the Scorpio Blue thin drives, or vice versa.
HGST also has a single-platter Z7K500 spinning at 7,200rpm with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and 32MB cache. That will probably outstream the Momentus Thin. Both of the Hitachi GST drives also have a bulk data encryption option.
We understand Seagate is thinking of adding a flash cache to the Momentus Thin, making a Momentus Thin XT, and providing near-SSD levels of performance with HDD capacity for Ultrabook suppliers wanting the best of both worlds. We might expect WD to flash-ify the single-platter Scorpio Blues too if that turns out to be popular with Ultrabook suppliers.
If Intel adds its 20GB and 24GB SSD 313 to its Ultrabook designs though – along with its hard disk drive hot read data caching software – then that could become moot.
WD's thin Scorpio Blues are shipping now through select distributors and resellers. They have a two-year warranty. The manufacturer's suggested retail price for the 500GB model (#: WD5000LPVT) is $99.99, and for the 320GB model (#: WD3200LPVT) is $79.99 – a lot cheaper than solid state drives. ®
COMMENTS
False advertising, failed reporting
"Seagate says the Momentus Thin can stream data at up to 300GB/sec; WD doesn't provide a streaming data figure."
So, the drive moves data faster than the 300Gb/sec bus it utilizes? Even sans the typo, a 5400rpm drive isn't going to move more than about 100Mb/sec over SATA3 (that's megabits, not gigabits). Looks like Seagate wins the "misleading advertising" award, and El Reg the "failed reporting" award for parroting it back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Data_transfer_rate
Careful...
I really don't think Seagate says that it's drive streams data at up to 300GB/sec.
Think about a 320GB drive; I doubt you can read it in 1.07 seconds, even if you were not limited by the nearly three orders of magnitude slower SATA interface (3Gb/s vs 2.4Tb/s).
Re: Near SSD performance?
No way will a 5400 RPM drive deliver 300MB/Sec. Not even in sequential read.
Think 150MB/Sec sequential read and you will be in the right ball park.
Re: Near SSD performance?
With a hard disk the peak speed equates to how fast data that is already in the cache can be sent to the host. As the cache in this case is 8MB it will take slightly more than 1/40th of a second to read all the data in it. At this point the speed at which you can transfer data off of the platter becomes important, and that's typically 1/3rd of the speed of cached data. A sequential read of the entire disk will likely average below 100MB/sec, an SSD will average close to the 550MB/sec number.
One typo in the specs given here:
The WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB ( WD5000LPVT) disk only supports 400G Operating Shock, not 4000G!
