The mother of all notebook hard drives: Scorpio Blue

I'm totally psyched that someone has finally released a 500GB hard drive that fits in my MacBook Pro. That someone is Western Digital. WD just announced its WD5000BEVT mobile hard drive, a.k.a. the Scorpio Blue with a huge 500GB capacity.

The 500GB barrier was broken earlier this year by Hitachi, Samsung and Fujitsu but their mechanisms are 12mm tall and only fit in the 17-inch MacBook Pro. The MBP 15-inch and MacBook 13-inch require a 9.5mm HDD mechanism and previous to the Scorpio Blue, the largest 9.5mm drive you could get was 320GB

The Scorpio Blue is a 5400RPM mechanism that features 12 ms access time and up to 3 Gb/s SATA interface speed. It also comes with WD's ShockGuard and SecurePark. MSRP for the WD Scorpio Blue is US$220 (500GB) and US$190 (400GB) and they'll be shipping imminently.