The new Scorpio Blue 750GB SATA hard drive from Western Digital (model WD7500BPVT, ~$120 street) is the new mac daddy in mobile hard drives, raising the bar for 9.5mm, 2.5-inch mechanisms to a massive 750GB. Previous 9.5mm high, 2.5-inch hard drives maxxed out at 640GB. The new WD drive spins at 5400 RPM and features a 3Gb/second SATA interface and 8MB of cache.
Hard drive capacity is important if you work with large audio and video files or if you're a music junkie or a data pack rat. The perfect setup in a MacBook Pro is a super-fast Solid State Drive (SSD) as your boot volume and the new 750GB WD HDD in an MCE Optibay enclosure, which is what I use.
The 750GB Scorpio Blue features:
- Massive capacity These drives offer the highest capacity for space-hungry operating systems with plenty of room left over for photos, music, and video.
- Quiet WhisperDrive technology combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.
- Reliable and rugged ShockGuard technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks. SecurePark parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off.
- Fast and efficient Ultra-fast 3 Gb/s SATA interface speed yields performance fit for demanding mobile applications.
- 3 year limited warranty
WD also makes a 1TB notebook drive, but alas, its taller 12.5mm enclosure will only fit in the 17-inch MacBook Pro (the 13 and 15-inch MBPs require the smaller 9mm mechanisms).