Chicago (IL) - Western Digital (WD) today launched its first harddrives for the growing notebook segment. The Scorpio series models are available in capacities from 40 to 80 GByte.

The harddrives aim at a segment where companies such as Seagate and Maxtor already fiercely battle for market shares. WD positions the performance of the drives on the higher end with a seek time of 12 ms and a rotation speed of 5400 rpm. Capacities of 40, 60 and 80 GByte target the current volume market for notebook harddrives.

The firm hopes that it can distinguish itself from the competition through "Softseek" algorithms, which make the "Scorpio the quietest 2.5 inch drive available on the market regardless of spin speed," WD said. The models also are equipped with shock absorbing technologies which help the drive to sustain impacts of up to 250 Gs while in operation and 900 Gs while idle.

WD also stressed that the Scorpio drives deliver higher than standard reliability with a minimum of 600,000 load/unload cycles without contamination.

The drives are currently shipping in volume and come with a standard cache of two MByte and an EIDE interface.