Introduction

Mobile users of today are looking for faster & more energy efficient solutions. SSD is a vogue word but none too many of these expensive discs are to be found yet as the primary disc of choice in the notebook.   Along comes Western Digital with its new range of Scorpio® Black™ mobile 2 ½” discs. These are primarily designed for the rugged road warrior who requires power, performance and a disc that does not compromise battery life. But we also see many gamers who love to use this form of mobile function and rely heavily upon cutting edge technology notebooks that have the sufficient powerful discs to run today’s modern games.

This is an unusual outing for us as we normally do not look into these items, though vogue changes in today’s lifestyles mean we have to keep up with the times. Many notebooks contain the more modern ATI and nVIDIA professional cards as it means that the studio/architect can present to the client readily a scene or drawing in uncompromised professionalism with the item in question firing up immediately with no lag time. But, and there always is a but, this can be the case with some notebook discs.

Western Digital has put a huge amount of resources into these discs so that the professional end user maintains their dignity at all times without any lapses in redraw. Nothing more frustrating than waiting for a picture to be redrawn and a noisy disc to boot.

Notwithstanding we must also remember that discs of this nature can also be found within Blade Servers, though this is for another outing, but must be highlighted.

Before we go on any further with the dialogue let’s have a few pictures to grasp the fantastic engineering that has gone into this tiny powerful beast.

Key Features of the Western Digital Scorpio® Black™ (Out Thanks to Western Digital PR for the information supplied here)

Desktop-class performance for notebook computers - With 7200 RPM spin speed, 16 MB cache, capacities up to 320 GB and Average Latencies of 5.5ms (nominal), these drives enable you to have the best of both worlds: the capacity and performance of a desktop PC with the convenience and portability of a notebook.
Massive capacity - WD's 320 GB 2.5-inch drives offer huge capacity for space-hungry operating systems like Windows Vista™, with plenty of room left over for photos, music, and video.

Low power consumption - With technologies like IntelliSeek™, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption and SecurePark™, which reduces power by parking the heads during low power idle mode, this drive delivers 5400 RPM-equivalent power consumption in a 7200 RPM drive.

Quiet - In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD’s exclusive WhisperDrive™ combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.

Reliable and rugged
WD's ShockGuard™ technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks during shipping and handling and in daily operation.
WD's SecurePark parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear and improved shock tolerance.

* Quick note – if you pop over to here you will see a quick 3D presentation showing SecurePark at work.  It’s worth the visit to see the video in action.

What does it hold is the ever magical Question?  Well according to the stats delivered from Western Digital PR people we see the following maximums can be achieved within each sector. 

   Up to 91,400 digital photos

  Up to 80,000 songs (MP3)

Up to 8,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)

Up to 24 hours of Digital Video (DV)

Up to 140 hours of DVD quality video

   Up to 38 hours of HD video

Next we briefly look at the claimed Power Dissipation.