Need more mobile storage space? Western Digital's new 7 mm Scorpio Blue hard drive can now fit inside your Ultrabook.
The new hard drive features Western Digital ShockGuard Technology, protecting your drive from up to 400Gs of shock due to an accidental drop while on the move. The 2.5-inch single-platter drive is available in 500 GB and 320 GB densities and is compatible with standard 9.5 mm notebook slots. The drive also boasts extremely low power consumption, and Western Digital's WhisperDrive Technology to ensure silence.
“Consumers want thin and light personal computers, but the limited storage capacity of SSD-based notebooks forces them to pick and choose what files to bring from their library,” said Matt Rutledge, vice president and general manager for WD client storage products. “With the release of the new WD Scorpio Blue 7mm mobile hard drives, WD is able to offer capacity, reliability and data protection features combined with excellent power management all in a slim form factor perfect for thin and light notebooks.”
Western Digital Scorpio Blue 7 mm hard drives are protected by a two-year limited warranty. Early pricing starts with the 500 GB model at $99.99 and the 320 GB model at $79.99. For more information visit Western Digital's product page.
Given the choice between a 'thin and light' laptop with 10 hour battery life, 20 second boot and 128 gb of ssd for $1100 and the same chasis with 8 hour battery life, 45 second boot and 500 gb of hdd for $700 and I'll take the second - it can fit my apps and all my files and I'll take that and a $400 price drop in exchange for two hours of life and double boot time.
Not to mention that Im still wary of ssd wear-leveling...despite having two pcs with ssds.
I agree with both points. Personally, I'm just going to wait it out and buy an "ultrabook" in a year or so when prices have dropped and the technology is all more in sync. While the ultrabook is technically not new (macbook air has been around for a while already), its still in its early stages and ssd tech is still getting better/cheaper, ivy bridge is right around the corner (and by summer 2013 we'll have the next gen cpu's), gpu's will be better, battery life will be better, and everything will be cheaper. Q2 2013 seems like a good time to cash in on all the waiting and jump into an "ultrabook", or whatever other comp you want to buy.
This. A 320GB HDD and a 128GB SSD at the "ultrabook" type form factor should be less than a 150$ price difference. (ssd max 220$ ish). Nothing wrong with more options though.
Inverse this statement and you get Apple with their $600+ shares.
SSDs don't have high enough capacity for the price. That's like asking why they still make Pentiums and i3s if we have SB Xeons.
The point of ultrabooks/ultrathins is partially to have high battery time. Having a faster hard drive would go against the point of this. That would also increase price.
1 platter 2.5" hard drives like this one take very little power. If you look at reviews of mSATA or regular SATA SSDs, they aren't much lower with power consumption/heat than laptop hard drives.
True that it's the same hard drive performance you'd find on a netbook.
7200RPM hard drives don't take much more power than 5400RPM laptop drives. In the desktop segment there is more of a difference, but in the mobile segment there isn't much. Maybe 1 watt more
So +1 7200RPM or GTFO
Even one watt can make a significant difference for a very low power machine such as an ultrabook. Besides that, the majority of people buying an ultrabook probably aren't performance junkies considering the already sub-par CPUs and graphics for a laptop.
But the subpar CPUs are quite speedy these days with Turboboost and all, nothing like Atom. It would be a shame if they were slow because of not having a hybrid 7200RPM hard drive.
A 5400RPM with a decent multi GB Flash cache would use less power than a 7200RPM drive and be as fast as or faster than the 7200RPM drive. Best of both worlds there? Agree on not using 4200RPM. That's going too far down the low power line of thought.
Maybe there could be a hard drive that can change it's spindle rate? IE, a hard drive with Turbo? Other ways of improving speed without increasing power usage too much would be having the hard drive have two read/write heads instead of only one. It wouldn't be the first hard dive to have more than one read/write head. Maybe use all three methods for very high performance while using less power than a regular 7200RPM hard drive would?