Introduction

With the SSD season slowing down, we finally get to break free and spend some time on other storage technology. The mechanical hard drive world has made some advances in recent months. Some of the biggest news has come from companies like Western Digital increasing the platter density on their disks. The 1TB mark for the 2.5" form factor was hit over a year ago, but all of the early drives used 15mm drive heights with three spinning platters. Western Digital was the first with a 1TB 15mm drive and they are also one of the first with a standard notebook size 1TB drive as well.

Since the dawn of mobile computing, notebook users have taken it on the chin when it comes to capacity. The same is true today with desktop users having access to 3TB drives, but the gap is slowly shrinking. The new Western Digital Scorpio Blue now goes up to 1TB, either with a 5,200 (WD10TPV) or 5,400 (WD10JPVT) RPM drive. Today we are looking at the faster of the two, a 5,400 RPM 1TB model that brings with it low power consumption, 8MB of cache, a notebook friendly 2.5" form factor and of course a massive 1TB capacity size that is sure to make your mobile computing experience more convenient.

The new Western Digital Scorpio Blue uses the new Advanced Format that increases format efficiency and is optimized for the latest operating systems like Windows Vista, 7 and Mac.