The highest-capacity hard drive in the industry has recently been made available by Western Digital (WD) in its Scorpio Blue range. The 2.5-inch hard drive, which uses the 3Gbit/s SATA interface, boasts of an enormous 1terabyte (TB) of storage!

While the 3-platter Scorpio Blue will provide users of devices containing the internal drive the highest areal density in the industry, a 750GB WD Scorpio Blue model has also been launched by Western Digital. Thus far, the Scorpio Blue assortment provided a maximum of 500GB capacity.

Both 1TB and the 750GB drives, which are 333GB/platter drives available now from select distributors and resellers, make up WD's My Passport Essential SE USB external drive product.

Equipped with a range of WD technologies like the WhisperDrive for a quieter operation, both the recently-released drives park their heads when not being used and are shock-proof. In addition, both of them have a 12.5mm depth measurement - thereby implying that it is not possible to retrofit these drives to notebooks with a 9.5mm deep
2.5-inch drive bay.

As such, both the drives will essentially be used by manufacturers in portable storage solutions, "select" notebooks and probably small form factor desktop PCs.

The 1TB Scorpio is priced at 205 euros, while the 750GB Scorpio is priced at 140 euros.