I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 256GB SSD to replace the dying Hitachi 250GB HDD in my MacBook Pro, but Western Digital has me thinking twice about going leaner and meaner. WD announced two new 2.5-inch mobile drives this morning in ridiculous capacities. Maybe not ridiculous, but who wouldn’t want a 750GB or 1TB drive in their laptop?!
The WD Scorpio Blue line features a 3 Gb/s transfer rate and WD’s WhisperDrive technology along with ShockGuard and SecurePark. 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.
• WhisperDrive™ – WD’s exclusive WhisperDrive technology combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to produce one of the quietest 2.5-inch drives available.
• ShockGuard™ – Leading-edge ShockGuard technology combines firmware and hardware advancements to meet the highest combined shock tolerance specifications required for mobile and notebook applications.
• 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.
I could do with 1TB of storage space.
1TB of storage capacity is way better than an SSD. I mean really, how often do you complain about speed? Not too often really. HDD’s are fast enough, its not like they’re slow or anything. Maybe once they double in speed will they be the hands down choice over sheer storage capacity. For the average consumer anyways.
HDDs are fast enough?
On what planet?
Anything under a 15000RPM mechanical HDD or an fast SSD is excrutiatingly slow for any serious work.
Laptop HDDs are so slow that I simply can’t use my laptop (MacBook Pro with 7200RPM HDD) for compiling large projects, video editing etc.
I’m in the process of getting rid of all mechanical HDDs and moving over to SSD.
Speed is EVERYTHING.
I complain about speed. Then again, i game on my notebook, I run VMs on my notebook, I use a lot of programs that handle a ton of small files rather than a small number of large files – in general that’s the kind of use an SSD will make a noticable difference in.
One of the reasons I made sure my most recent notebook had two drive bays was because of that – I can put an SSD on the first bay, and a rotational drive on the second, giving me the speed on the important stuff, without losing the space I need.
There is no way any sane person can argue that HDDs are better than SSDs. Maybe right now you can get a lof more capacity for a lot less, but HDDs are doomed just like floppy disks, CDs and DVDs. Primary reason: they require moving parts. In 10 or 20 years people are going to look back and laugh at our DVDs and HDDs like we laugh at tape drives today. SSDs are going to continue to evolve and it’s not long until they’re faster, more reliable, less power hungry and has more capacity than HDDs.
The future has no moving parts.
“1TB of storage capacity is way better than an SSD”? How can you say that? SSDs and large HDDs are used for two completely different purposes. Maybe for someone that has 700GB+ of media, a 1TB drive is better than an SSD. But for your average user, an 80GB SSD provides adequate disk space to run Windows/Office/IE/iTunes (or the Mac or Linux equivalents), plus some music.
How can you possibly say “HDD’s are fast enough, its not like they’re slow or anything”? Hard disks have long been the slowest hardware component in computers. Gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0 (not to mention the upcoming 3.0 standard), FireWire, and 2.0+ GHz quad core processors have rapidly outpaced HDD speed.
“Maybe once they double in speed will they be the hands down choice over sheer storage capacity. For the average consumer anyways.” I have two problems with this:
– Again, most users will never use even 20% of the 750+ GB HDDs that many desktop computers come with today. Most people simply don’t have that much data at home.
– For random disk reads (AKA almost all home computer use), SSDs are between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs. Why would they need to “double in speed” to be the hands down choice? They’re already up to 140 TIMES faster than HDDs!
I really don’t know what you do with your laptop if 80 Gb are enough for you. Also how can you compare different things like USB speed and HDD? Each type of device has its constraints and development difficulties.
Also I know that SSD are fast but they are also very expensive. So, one must consider every aspect when purchasing a SSD or a HDD.
It’s pretty easy to compare things like USB and network speed against HDD speed – have you ever done a data transfer? Data transfer from a USB device such as a camera or even an external HD is limited by the speed(s) of the HDD(s), not the data transfer rate of USB. As such, if the speed of the disk is increased, the overall speed of the data transfer is increased because the HDD is the limiting factor. OVERALL in computing today, HDD speed is a limiting constraint. This is a pretty widely accepted fact.
Personally, 80GB is NOT enough for my home computer use. However, 80GB is plenty to host my OS and applications, while my media and other large data sets can reside on larger capacity HDDs. However, I consider myself a poweruser – not a normal home user. For the average home user, 80GB of disk space is plenty. If you’re that worried about the 80GB number, point people to the 160GB version instead.
Nice try James but no, USB 2.0 isn’t faster than a modern hard drive. High speed is 480 Mbps shared between all devices (a single device is not allowed to use all the bandwidth even if it is alone on the bus), and then subtracting overhead and converting to bytes, you get in the neighborhood of 40MB/s. Whereas today’s $100-ish hard drives peak at about 100MB/s. Oh yeah, USB also adds milliseconds to the access time because of the timeslot system it uses.
Firewire-400 is about the same due to being a dedicated link, Firewire-800 just about keeps up with the HDD.
GbE is about the same speed as the hard drive.
SATA-II is 3 times faster, SCSI Ultra320 about the same. USB SuperSpeed will take also the pressure off the interface again, for single or paired drives. SAS and FibreChannel are just waaaay up there.
Seems you’re operating under the assumption that SSD’s are really fast… they’re fast for reading, slow for writing.
They’re very durable (for people who tend to drop their laptops), don’t “skip” (for the, well, shaky laptop users) and lightweight for, well, everyone.
Intel’s new X-25M Gen 2 SSDs have resolved the “fast for reading, slow for writing” problem. As I recall, even the older generation SSDs still had faster write times than standard HDDs. Admittedly, the price wasn’t quite worth it for the small performance gain on that end. However, now it is.
Andy is correct that one must consider every aspect when purchasing a SSD or a HDD. Good call.
amen to that. :)
i only have an ssd in my mcabook air but prefer storage size vs speed/performance on my big hp dv6700t laptop.
ssd = amazing suspend/resume times but for a price and limited storage (well, atleast in my case w/the rev a macbook air i use).
“But for your average user, an 80GB SSD provides adequate disk space to run Windows/Office/IE/iTunes (or the Mac or Linux equivalents), plus some music.”
Wow! Welcome to 2005! I don’t know who this “average user” is you’re referring to but current trends in the ability to process more digital content ( faster processors and GPUs ) has led to its integration, in the form of production as well as processing, in everything from the low level parts of the UI to the desktop environment to the application layer necessitating larger and larger storage media — basically the exponential increase in transistor density/speed and/or processing power continually opens up new opportunities in the generation and processing of new, more complex and more space hungry digital content which in turn leads to exponentially larger storage media following in lock-step. This has how it’s always been and I dare project that this trend will continue far into the future.
Your statement sounds quite Ludditish in the nascent age of on-demand digital content where an HD movie file can easily take up 50GB. Personally, I run Linux and I’m currently using 5TB of storage.
“Gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0 (not to mention the upcoming 3.0 standard), FireWire, and 2.0+ GHz quad core processors have rapidly outpaced HDD speed.”
Sorry, but please get your facts straight before spouting nonsense. A RAID array of normal 7200RPM drives, a huge drive with a gigantic areal density, or something like a 10K or 15K RPM drive will easily generate 1Gbps bandwidth saturating Firewire which tops out at 800Mbps and USB 2.0 which tops out at 480Mbps. In fact, current high end hard drives, especially in RAID arrays have begun to saturate the 3.0Gbps SATA II standard, which is why 6.0Gbps SATA III is about to be released. ( if Marvell gets their act together ) Furthermore, you’re comparing apples to oranges when you mention processor clock speed. What you should have mentioned was CPU interconnect bandwidth, which does scale with processor clock speed multiplied by the maximum number of bits capable of being loaded or stored per cycle.
“- Again, most users will never use even 20% of the 750+ GB HDDs that many desktop computers come with today. Most people simply don’t have that much data at home.”
Yeah, that’s where this thing called “The Internet” comes into play, not to mention data from digital camcorders etc…
“- For random disk reads (AKA almost all home computer use), ”
What was the sample size used in this statistic or did you just pull it out of your ass? While random access reads do dominate sequential reads *in terms of the number of reads performed*, usually they’re small in size, and hence in duration, or they wouldn’t be considered a random access read. On the other hand, when a sequential read is performed, it usually involves a large amount of data. Examples would be program loading, program ( especially game ) start up, file transfers and/or copies, manipulating and playing digital content, especially video etc. and these do take a lot of time. While random access reads might be more numerous, sequential reads usually account for most of the lethargy in a computer system.
“SSDs are between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs. Why would they need to “double in speed” to be the hands down choice? They’re already up to 140 TIMES faster than HDDs!”"
First, you fail to mention that the “140 TIMES faster” only applies to random access *reads* . Writes, as well as reads to a lesser extent, to flash based media suffer from performance degradation caused by block fragmentation due to wear leveling algorithms.
Son of a bitch! Just when I bought the 500 GB model they come out with this.
This is excellent news and especially from western digital, my favorite Hard disk company. I can shed my USB based external drives and swap my internal HD with this TB disk.
How thick is it though? It’s not terribly useful for most people if it’s 12.5mm.
This is awesome, I could really use the 1TB in my Macbook and in my external 2.5″ HD enclosure.
-Joe
FYI, this WD 1TB Passport is not shipping, even from the Western Digital direct site.