Western Digital is the first hard disk drive maker to begin shipping a 320GB HDD in the 2.5" form-factor. WD Scorpio 320GB has the following specs: 5400rpm, 8MB of cache and a Serial ATA-300 interconnection. The manufacturer touts a 4.20ms average latency, 12ms read seek time, 2.0ms track-to-track seek time, 850Mb/s buffer to disk transfer rate, power consumption of 2.5W during reads/writes, 2W in idle mode, 0.25W in standby mode and 0.1W in sleep mode. Like all WD mobile hard drives, the Scorpio 320GB supports such technologies as IntelliSeek, ShockGuard and WhisperDrive.
"In today"s market, new notebook systems are increasingly targeting heavy duty applications in the office and home. As system manufacturers improve performance and add data hungry features, high-capacity hard drives become a key ingredient that allows users to fully benefit from the latest computing technologies," said Jim Morris, WD"s vice president and general manager of notebook storage.