September 12 - 9:55am EDT   Western Digital on Friday began shipping the 500GB Scorpio Blue, the company's largest-capacity notebook drive. Claiming a record in the process, Western Digital says the disk is the only one to make no sacrifices in size or speed to reach its storage goal. The Serial ATA drive is as tall as normal notebook hard drives at 9.5mm (0.37in) and spins at the same 5,400RPM as most other 2.5-inch disks. Quietness is also considered paramount with an optimized seeking process cutting down on the noise generated by the drive head. [full story]

June 2 - 10:55am EDT   Western Digital started the week by shipping the 320GB Scorpio Black, its largest-capacity high-speed drive. The 2.5-inch Serial ATA drive enters the increasingly competitive arena of performance notebook drives and includes specs that are normally reserved for desktop drives, including a 7,200RPM spin rate and 16MB of cache to reduce the need for disk access. It also touts measures to protect against damage from the read head; a safe parking technique avoids damage when the drive is switched off, while the more common addition of a free-fall sensor keeps the head away from the magnetic surface in the event of a drop. [full story]