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WD pushes out super-slim shock-resistant Ultrabook drive

Single platter

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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. ®

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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

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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).

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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.

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