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Western Digital joins Fujitsu with a 250GB 5400RPM SATA notebook HDD

Not to be outdone by Fujitsu which recently announced its 250GB 2.5" 5400RPM MHY2 BH Series notebook HDDs, Western Digital today announced its new 250GB Scorpio notebook HDD.

Western Digital's 250GB Scorpio takes full advantage of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and features a Serial ATA interface. Spindle speed for the new drive is a respectable 5400RPM.

Other features of the new Scorpio drive include IntelliSeek technology which improves seek performance, WhisperDrive to ensure near-silent operation and ShockGuard technology to protect the drive in the event of shock/jostling.

"The 2.5-inch market continues to be a major focus for WD, and this 250 GB WD Scorpio drive represents our second-generation PMR platform," said Jim Morris, Western Digital's VP and GM of notebook storage.

"The WD Scorpio 250 GB hard drive is a direct result of the significant investments WD has made in proprietary head technologies as well as significant system level feature innovation. With the introduction of our latest-generation WD Scorpio drives, WD continues to offer mobile computing and portable storage customers the same outstanding quality, reliability and performance that have earned the company a leadership position in the desktop PC market."

The new Scorpio WD2500BEVS drives are available now from Western Digital's online store for $199.99 USD.

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Not a bad price...
By daftrok on 5/21/2007 2:01:15 PM , Rating: 2
For a notebook HDD that size its actually a pretty good deal and a worthwhile update. I just can't wait until they make a 7200rpm version of this.




RE: Not a bad price...
By Hare on 5/21/2007 2:12:27 PM , Rating: 2
Even at 5400 rpm performance should be pretty sweet. Increased density equals increased data transfer rate.


RE: Not a bad price...
By TomZ on 5/21/2007 2:14:55 PM , Rating: 2
Also, increased speed also means increased heat and faster battery drain. 5400RPM is the sweet spot right now balancing performance and power/heat for laptops.


RE: Not a bad price...
By UNHchabo on 5/21/2007 2:39:12 PM , Rating: 3
I haven't done any research myself, but I heard that upgrading a notebook from a 5400rpm HD to a 7200rpm HD (assuming all else is the same) results in a 25% increase in performance, at only a 6% increase in power consumption.

If this is correct, sounds like a good tradeoff to me, especially if you have the HD set to spin down when it's not in use.


RE: Not a bad price...
By jak3676 on 5/21/2007 2:49:35 PM , Rating: 2
I'd say that's pretty far fetched. Maybe back before perpendicular recording it was a bigger deal, but on modern drives the difference is very small. Some of the higher density 5400 RPM drives will match a good 7200 RPM drive. As someone above mentioned, throughput is also a function of density so a higher density 5400 RPM drive can compare well to the lower density 7200 RPM drives.


RE: Not a bad price...
By UNHchabo on 5/21/2007 3:47:38 PM , Rating: 2
I'm really not sure if what I said was true, but at the very least, I did say "assuming all else is the same." Meaning drives that have the same amount of cache, the same density, the same capacity, the only difference is that one is spinning at a higher rate.


RE: Not a bad price...
By Axbattler on 5/21/2007 4:05:36 PM , Rating: 2
I am somewhat skeptical about that. Regarding the power consumption, I'll give it a maybe. Simply because HD is only one of the many other device draining the battery, so a 25% increase in RPM does not translate to a 25% of additional battery draining (though 6% seem low).

But similarly, I doubt that all things being equal, an added 25% RPM will add 25% of (presumably overall) performance. First, the RPM is only one of the many factors affecting the overall performance of a drive. So if all the other factors (density, cache, firmware optimisations among others) do not improve by 25%, then I do not see the entire HD performance improve by 25%, let alone the overall laptop performance.


RE: Not a bad price...
By Souka on 5/21/2007 5:07:17 PM , Rating: 2
just go look at specs... look at idle and seek wattage draw... at MOST you'll see 1 watt difference at seek I bet.
(since laptop HDs don't always seek, lets average at 1/2 watt)

1/2 watt, doesn't mean squat for a laptop like HP's 20" LCD laptop..., but it does mean a lot for a Lenovo X61 ultra-low wattage CPU laptop.

My T42 laptop draws about 14-16 watts when on battery (adaptive CPU setting), full LCD brigtness, wi-fi on, and surfing the net. A 1/2 watt difference is about %6 difference, or about 14min on a 4 hour battery run...

My old T30 laptop doing the same tasks would draw 30 watts... which would mean %3 difference in battery run time... even less signifigant.

There are no clear "answers" or "winners".... its all about what is important to you... Battery run time, HD seek time, HD transfer rates, HD Capacity.

weight and rank those items to best figure out what you want....


RE: Not a bad price...
By Souka on 5/21/2007 5:08:21 PM , Rating: 2
Oh yeah... forgot to add "price" to the list... many of you this is the #1 factor...


RE: Not a bad price...
By jak3676 on 5/22/2007 10:55:01 AM , Rating: 2
True - You did say if all else remains the same. For a direct comparison of drives, you may be closer to truth than I was giving you credit for. I guess I'm just not used to seeing high capacity 7200 RPM drives. (The few that are out there are out of my price range anyway.)

Check out storagereview.com or tom's hardware for some good comparisons. You'll see that some of the recent perpendicular 5400RPM drives are outperforming the older 7200 RPM drives. While 7200 RPM drives do have some advantages, actual implentation makes more of difference than straight spindle speed.


RE: Not a bad price...
By bkiserx7 on 5/21/2007 4:13:29 PM , Rating: 3
But seek times will always be better with the higher RPM drive. Example: WD's Raptor will still whoop the 750s and 1TBs.


RE: Not a bad price...
By ajfink on 5/21/2007 11:47:37 PM , Rating: 2
My Hitachi 7k is cooler and quieter than the 5400 RPM Fujitsu drive it replaced. It doesn't drain the battery any faster, and program load times are much lower.

All in all, I'm quite the proponent of 7200 RPM notebook drives. That being said, a 250GB, 5400 drive would be quite speedy in terms of data transfer speed.

All of them pail in comparison to SSDs in terms of heat/power usage and speed, though. The only problems are the extremely high price and low capacities.


RE: Not a bad price...
By Samus on 5/22/2007 2:29:34 PM , Rating: 3
7200RPM is too hot, noisy and power hungry. That all results in less reliability.


Raid6
By electriple9 on 5/21/2007 9:15:43 PM , Rating: 2
I dont think raid6 is possible with only three disks. Also whats the difference between raid 01 and raid 10.
Thanks




RE: Raid6
By Kakumba on 5/21/2007 9:36:41 PM , Rating: 2
RAID 6 is not possible on 3 disks, or if your controller allows it, its silly.

The difference is that 0+1 is, at simplest, 2 drives striped, with a mirror of that array. 10 is 2 mirrored arrays, with data striped across them.


Hmm...
By Oobu on 5/21/2007 4:17:54 PM , Rating: 3
I should see if this will work in my PS3, as 250GB would be excellent. This 60GB drive is too small for my needs.




Where are the Hybrid drives?
By jkresh on 5/21/2007 7:31:18 PM , Rating: 2
After all the talk before vista about how hybrid drives would be so beneficial I still haven't seen much of a push from any of the major manufacturers. Where are the drives with 1-2gigs of flash memory on them? At this rate it almost seems like we will see reasonably priced ssd's before we see hybrid drives in the mainstream.




RE: Where are the Hybrid drives?
By TomZ on 5/21/2007 9:56:29 PM , Rating: 1
In my view, hybrid drives don't make any sense in the longer term. If you are going to add flash for use by the OS for non-volatile caching, then it should be flash that is connected to the processor, not in the HDD at the other end of the SATA cable. That is the approach of Intel's Robson technology, which I would expect to dominate compared to hybrid drives. Hybrid drives are only useful as a transition before laptop motherboards get Robson capability. I think this is why you don't see much interest on the part of HDD manufacturers for hybrid drives.


Finally
By caqde on 5/21/2007 3:20:50 PM , Rating: 1
Western Digital finally released a hard drive based on Perpedicular recording. Hopefully they will release some 3.5" Harddrives based on this technology in the near future. Competition would be nice since the only companies with 3.5" perpendicular Harddrives is Seagate and Hitachi as far as I know.




RE: Finally
By dodgybob on 5/21/2007 7:18:14 PM , Rating: 1
There's one UK retailer with a 750GB WD drive available on pre-order so this technology may be arriving in their desktop drives soon.


7200 only
By FXi on 5/21/2007 9:41:37 PM , Rating: 2
I only buy 7200 drives for my laptop, so sadly all WD's drives are not useful to me. However, I suppose it's nice to see them catching up. Be nice if they actually made a 7200 200-250 to go along with this drive. Then folks could choose performance or conservation as their higher need.

For me 7200 is the only way to go. And yes, having had, and used both intensively, there is a quite noticeable difference in actual use.




Sometimes smaller is better
By eppenoire on 5/22/2007 12:02:23 AM , Rating: 2
I love improvements in HDs, this should carry over to their server line of drives. For my laptops I prefer smaller drives, because it encourages me to transfer my files over to the file server rather than leave them on the laptop.