Riding on the heels of the Samsung Spinpoint M8 drive, Western Digital released a two-platter hard drive that holds 1 TB of data. The Scorpio Blue is 9.5 mm thick, which means it will fit into nearly all commercial notebook computers.
In June, Samsung presented their offering, the first 1TB drive for notebooks ever announced. Unfortunately for the Korean manufacturer, they have not been able to ship their product. Western Digital's Scorpio Blue is now shipping, making it the first terabyte notebook hard drive actually on the market.
"With the release of the 1 TB WD Scorpio Blue notebook drive in a 9.5 mm package, WD is able to offer the greatest storage capacity available for use in portable computing environments," said Western Digital vice president Matt Rutledge.
Traditional terabyte drives use three 334-GB platters to achieve their capacity, which inevitably makes the drives too thick to fit in anything but a desktop or a specially-modified notebook case. Both Samsung's and Western Digital's new drives use two 500-GB platters, made possible by advances in platter formatting.
Such increases in hard drive capacity were predicted by researcher Mark Kryder in 2009, who claimed that by 2020, 14 TB hard drives would sell for $40. (When the study came out, 500 GB internal drives were selling for about $100. Today one can buy a 2 TB internal desktop drive for less than that.)
The development of these drives shows an increase in the storage capacity of hard disk platters, which in the latter part of the last decade had been declining. Solid state drives have been threatening to beat them out in the long run, but it looks like they're being given a run for their money.
