Western Digital Ups Density With 750GB Notebook Drive

Western Digital today has begun shipping its Scorpio Blue 750GB laptop hard drive, delivering new heights of areal density along with low heat and low power consumption designed to make it appealing for a wide range of uses.

The holy grail of hard drive manufacturers has always been capacity. With 375GB per platter for a total capacity of 750GB, Western Digital has achieved a maximum areal density calculated at over 600 gigabits per square inch, one of the highest in the industry. While WD was not the first to announce a 750GB 9.5mm (standard-height) 2.5-inch laptop drive, it is the first to actually ship one.

But Western Digital (NYSE: WDC) doesn't stop with increased capacity. The drive is also designed to keep cool and sip at the power supply, making it ideal for notebooks.

"It's a follow-on capacity to our existing 640GB, and we are using all our advanced technology to bring a solid, dependable drive to market," Edward Coady, WD's product manager for the drive, told InternetNews.com.

So, how does WD get so much into such a tiny, power-efficient drive? A new trick that drive fabricators are using, and an overall trend in the industry, is a move from a 512-byte sector to 4K per sector. WD calls this "Advanced Format."

A sector is the smallest unit of storage on a hard drive: Think of seats in a stadium. Right now, each seat holds 512 bytes. By increasing that to 4 kilobytes, one action to store data moves eight times the information.

Error correction is also simplified and enhanced through the process: Instead of checking eight "seats" for 4K of data, only one error check needs to be performed. This yields better accuracy with less work, allowing for faster data throughput. Additionally, capacity is also increased up to 11 percent due to more efficient utilization of the disk surface.

The new 4K sector format is supported by Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well as Apple's OS X 10.4 "Tiger," 10.5 "Leopard" and 10.6 "Snow Leopard." For backward compatibility with Windows XP, a little work is required, Coady said: "There's a little utility that you run one time. It aligns the drive to optimize the new 4K sectors for Windows XP."

The utility, called WD Align, would be required to be run before XP is installed on or used to partition the drive. It would also be required to be run before many popular "clone" utilities are used to move a partition onto the disk. An alternative to this utility is a jumper that changes the alignment, but this would only work with XP if certain conditions were met.

Volume shipping of the WD Scorpio Blue 750GB laptop hard drive begins today through select distributors and resellers. Manufacturer's suggested retail price for the drive is $149. The drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty.

Gene Hirschel is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.