WD's Terabyte Scorpio Notebook Drive Tested

MojoKid writes "Recently, Western Digital stepped out and announced their new 1TB 9.5mm Scorpio Blue 2.5-inch notebook drive. The announcement was significant in that it's the first drive of this capacity to squeeze that many bits into an industry standard 9.5mm, 2.5" SATA form-factor. To do this, WD drove areal density per platter in their 2.5" platform to 500GB. The Scorpio Blue 1TB drive spins at only 5400RPM but its performance is actually surprising. Since areal density per platter has increased significantly, the drive actually bests some 7200RPM drives."

Comments

How is that surprising?

[dgatwood]

The Scorpio Blue 1TB drive spins at only 5400RPM but its performance is actually surprising. Since areal density per platter has increased significantly, the drive actually bests some 7200RPM drives.

Has there ever been a single generation of drives in which the next generation of 5400 RPM drives did not beat the existing generation of 7200 RPM drives? Okay, maybe you have to skip two generations. Either way, it's not unusual by any means. When people ask on audio recording boards whether they need 7200 RPM drives, I'm always quick to point out that a new 5400 RPM laptop drive approaches the speed of the early 15,000 RPM desktop drives, and can spank the 7200 RPM laptop drives from just a few years back.

The only thing surprising about this drive is that normally the 7200 RPM drives come first, before the 5400 RPM drives at that density.