Western Digital today announced it is shipping the WD Scorpio Blue 7 mm hard drive, the latest addition to its low-power series of disks. Specified to a 400Gs shock tolerance, the new single-platter WD Scorpio Blue small form factor hard drives are available in 500 GB and 320 GB capacities and the drives' compatibility with 9.5 mm slots allow them to fit into mainstream notebooks as well as slimmer notebook and Ultrabook devices that require a 7 mm drive height.

WD says that the drive's power management features and algorithms optimize the way the drive seeks data, which significantly improves power consumption. WD's exclusive WhisperDrive technology enables quiet performance, while WD's SecurePark parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear.

Shipping now, the WD Scorpio Blue 7 mm 2.5-inch mobile hard drives are covered by a two-year limited warranty. MSRP for the 500 GB, model #: WD5000LPVT is $99.99 USD and the 320 GB, model #: WD3200LPVT is $79.99 USD.

Specifications (500GB and 320Gb versions)

- Rotational Speed: 5,400 RPM (nominal)
- Buffer Size: 8 MB
- Capacity: 500GB, 320GB
- Interface: SATA 3 Gb/s
- Height: 6.8 mm
- Depth: 100.2 mm
- Width: 69.85 mm
- Weight: 0.09 kg

Shock
- Operating Shock (Read): 400G, 2ms
- Non-operating Shock: 1000G, 2 ms

Acoustics
- Idle Mode: 17 dBA (average)
- Seek Mode 0: 22 dBA (average)

Temperature
- Operating: -0° C to 60° C
- Non-operating: -40° C to 65° C

Power Dissipation
- Read/Write: 1.4 Watts
- Idle: 0.55 Watts
- Standby: 0.13 Watts
- Sleep: 0.13 Watts