Western Digital Releases 1TB Scorpio Blue Mobile Hard Drive

Don’t bother wiping your eyes… you didn’t read the news title incorrectly! It feels like storage companies just released 500GB 2.5″ mobile drives, but today Western Digital looks to put those to shame, with their latest Scorpio Blue models, available in both 750GB and 1TB densities. WD if the first to pull this off, and as a result, pretty soon you’ll be able to have a full 1TB worth of storage on your notebook… with only one drive.

The new 1TB density also opens up room for even more storage on your workstation notebook if you have room for more than one hard drive. Or, another way to look at is, is now you’ll be able to use an SSD as your main drive, and then use a 1TB Scorpio Blue as your secondary. Either way, 1TB in a drive that small, is rather incredible. But…

With a height of 12.5mm, the latest drives are close to 32% taller (depth-wise) than typical mobile drives, which means that they will not fit in the majority of notebooks. So, if you’re planning to purchase such a drive, it’s important to make sure your notebook will support it. WD realizes that adoption for mobile platforms will be limited, at least at first, so they’re pushing the new drives more for external storage purposes, such as with their My Passport Essential SE portable drives.

Any way you look at it, though, 1TB in such a small drive is nothing short of incredible. That’s an insane amount of storage to be able to carry with you anywhere… not to mention, it’d be perfect for backing up your computer to. It’s so small, you can stash it anywhere and not look at it until you need it again! Pricing will of course be a bit higher than double 500GB models, but not by much. The 1TB version will sell for $249.99 USD, while the 750GB will carry a price tag of $189.99.

The WD Scorpio Blue 750 GB and 1 TB hard drives have a 12.5 mm form factor[1] and are ideally suited for use in portable storage solutions, such as the newly released My Passport™ Essential SE Portable USB Drives. Other applications include select notebooks and small form factor desktop PCs, where quiet and cool operation are important. Both WD Scorpio Blue drives deliver high-performance with a 3 gigabits per second (Gb/s) transfer rate.