A range of hard drives designed to give notebook computers a capacity of up to 500GB of memory has been released by Western Digital.

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The company has started shipments and OEM qualification of its WD Scorpio Blue 2.5-inch notebook hard drives with capacities up to 500GB. Utilising 250 GB-per-platter technology, the WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB and 400 GB SATA hard drives are designed for notebook computers and portable storage devices.

WD Scorpio Blue delivers a 3 Gb/s transfer rate, while including proprietary features that make the drive quiet, and allowing to run at cool operating temperatures. The WD Scorpio Blue 500GB is the highest capacity 2.5-inch, standard form-factor (9.5mm) hard drive shipping-to-date, and is developed for use in OEM notebook platforms that offer the highest storage capacities to the market. 

The new WD Scorpio Blue drive expands the company’s range of 2.5-inch, 5400 RPM, mobile hard drive offerings to capacity points up to 500 GB.

Features include:

• WhisperDrive – this technology combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield WD Scorpio Blue hard drives as a quiet 5400 RPM, 2.5-inch drives available.
• ShockGuard – leading-edge ShockGuard technology combines firmware and hardware advancements to protect the drive mechanics and platter surface to meet the shock tolerance specifications required for mobile and notebook applications.
• IntelliSeek – this technology, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.

RRP
500GB $279
400 GB $239