Western Digital Announces 1TB Mobile HD

Western Digital has announced a couple of new 2.5-inch mobile hard drives weighing in at 750GB and 1TB. The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate and Western Digital's "WhisperDrive" tech along with specialized shock tolerance and head parking to ensure durability. "Both models are shipping now through various channels; the 1TB model is currently available in My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The Scorpio Blue 750GB model has a suggested sticker price of $190 while the Scorpio Blue 1TB is a mere $250. The My Passport Essential SE 1 TB portable drive is $299.99 USD and the 750 GB model is $199.99 USD."

Comments

Now I can upgrade my PS3

[the_humeister]

to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[TuaAmin13]

Except this is a 12.5mm height drive. The PS3 uses a thinner drive.

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[masshuu]

a Dremel will fix that

Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

The plan: Get one of these TB drives and stuff it full of FLAC rips from my massive CD collection. Then USB it to a WD TV box and my cheapy $80 15in flat panel monitor, routing the audio to my insane audio system.

Finally: Done.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Facegarden]

elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.

Really? Really....? You really think they say it works best with THEIR drives for any reason other than to make you think you should buy their drives? It's just marketing fluff, like when Kraft Mac and Cheese says it tastes great with Kraft Parmesan cheese on top, as if any other Parmesan cheese isn't going to provide the same taste sensation.
-Taylor

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[teg]

... Kraft Parmesan cheese ...

There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Penguinshit]

Mac-N-Cheese is made with cheddar. Using parmesan would result in a bowl of pasta vomit. Every cheese has a proper usage.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Kaboom13]

Exactly, I hate when the Plebians call things based on what they look like, taste like, and are manufactured in identical processes too, instead of where they were made! Indeed the other day I saw a man in the deli order a sandwich! How absurd, as if you could get a layered meat and bread product assembled in Sandwich, in the Kent region of England, in a deli in the United States. I politely tried to correct him, but he persisted in his error, and after my repeated attempts, told me to "Shut-up and fuck off".

Transfer rate

[Mad Merlin]

The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate...

Read: The drives feature a SATA 2 interface, which has a theoretical maximum of 3 Gigabits/s transfer rate, while in practice you'll get 1/4th of that if you're lucky.

Re:Transfer rate

[Kjella]

And don't forget that's 3Gbit/s in 10 bit encoding with two parity bits, so you'll at most get 300MB/s. From cache you can get fairly close to that but reading from platters is slower, couldn't find any info on actual sequential read/write speeds.

Excellent!

[cashman73]

So now, we'll not only be able to store CowboyNeal's entire porn collection on one disk, but have a cheap second disk to store CowboyNeal's entire personality and consciousness! He's going to be like, immortal, or something,... ;-) The only question is, WHY in the hell would we want to do that?!?!

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Hadlock]

Imagine being a photographer on the Paris-Dakar race where you're shooting hundreds (thousands?) of photos on a high-res DSLR for three weeks (a week before hand, the race, the aftermath) out in the field. There are a ton of week long sailing races that any one photographer might blow through 1000 photos a day. Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute. How many hours of video could national geographic tape with just three of these in the field with a MacBook Pro? Lots of options for pros. Consumers will buy these but rarely use them to their potential.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[R2.0]

"Imagine being a photographer on the Paris-Dakar race where you're shooting hundreds (thousands?) of photos on a high-res DSLR for three weeks (a week before hand, the race, the aftermath) out in the field. There are a ton of week long sailing races that any one photographer might blow through 1000 photos a day. Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute. How many hours of video could national geographic tape with just three of these in the field with a MacBook Pro? Lots of options for pros. Consumers will buy these but rarely use them to their potential."

And then he drops something the size of a cigarette pack into the drink or into the sand and it's all gone. They need to make sure they buy 2.

Nice, except you probably can't use them

[diamondsw]

These are 12.5mm drives. The VAST majority of laptops from the last several years (certainly any new enough to have a SATA interface) only allow for 9.5mm drives. I'm sure there's some Alienware rig that's large enough to take them, but chances are your laptop will not.

This is a marketing stunt to say "we're first", even though it won't be usable for most people.

Re:Cripes, it's like they're IN the porn business.

[Monkeedude1212]

2 and a half inches doesn't get you into the porn business.

Believe me I've tried.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Kjella]

3 Gbps = uncompressed 1080p60 video, used for high-end interconnects and such. Recordings are almost always made compressed, even in professional cameras. AVCHD has a maximum of 24 Mbps = 180MB/minute, there's probably more exotic format for huge movie production cameras but even cameras in the 2000$-5000$ range use AVCHD since it takes a helluva camera to capture more detail than that. The rest is basicly to avoid generational loss so a pipeline looks like:

Camera -> (lossy) -> RAW -> (lossless editing, filtering, special effects etc.) -> Movie -> (lossy) -> final encode for consumer.

You may think it sounds a lot but video compresses very, very well along in the x, y and time axis. In fact, the better the camera the better it usually compresses because everything is clean while noisy, grainy and flickery video eats bandwidth like crazy. I guess if you're shooting staged movie shots with tons of explosions you'll hook up the camera via one of these 3 Gbps interconnects to a real storage kit and save it uncompressed directly, but then you'll need something much faster than this disk anyway.

On a related note, a lot of the videos today are basicly just "filling out the disk" of a BluRay, they don't have that amount of detail. You can tell when there's 1080p reencodes that you need a magnifying class to tell is a reencode. At BluRay sizes we should have had 2160p video instead, you'd get much more detail for 50GB - not that many can tell anyway. So you don't really need all that much space except when you're working with uncompressed intermediaries, but that's what the huge workstations with attached SANs are for.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Kjella]

fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital".

I don't have the sources now but it was a study on resolution in theaters. Basically a good master negative of a film can have 1500-2000 lines of resolution, but even the best analog cinema prints had only 800-1000 lines of resolution. So digital 1080p movies on digital screens are no worse than before. However, analog film directly scanned to digital is very impressive and probably needs a 4096x2048 (4K) camera to match. Fortunately things are progressing fast and the RED Scarlet coming this year should bring 3K to the 3000$ mark and 4K below 10000$. Compared to all the other costs, that's not much. Hell, even 9K IMAX should drop below 50000$ this year. Personally I'm most impressed with the prosonsumer cams though, it's amazing what they pack in a small HD camera and it gets better every year.

Keeping up their mojo

[mcrbids]

Having just had to deal with a string of bad 1 TB+ size Seagate drives going bad (100% failure rate in 6 months, baby!) and switching to WD with good results, I have to say that I hope WD keeps up their good name.

I tend to find that none of the manufacturers are consistently better or worse than the others. Seagate has a good line of firmware, and for a year or two their drives are excellent and reliable. They they go sour and it's a good idea to switch to somebody else for a while. They go off and on, back and forth. For the past few years I've steered towards Seagate. Now, I'm a WD fan. I've loved Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, Fujitsu, Conner, and Micropolis. (remember them?)

All have had their good runs and bad runs. Some of the bad runs killed the company. (eg: IBM's Desk-star "death-star" line)

Go WD!