First 2.5 inch terabyte-sized drive shipping

Western Digital announced today that they are the world’s first manufacturer to ship 2.5 inch SATA disks with a 1 TB capacity. Their Scorpio Blue line of mobile harddisks now has two models that are unmatched in size by any of their competitors; a 1 TB and a 750 GB model. The closest any of their rivals gets is a 640 GB model by Seagate. Just don’t expect this to turn up in your next laptop anytime soon:

The WD Scorpio Blue 750 GB and 1 TB hard drives have a 12.5 mm form factor¹ and are ideally suited for use in portable storage solutions, such as the newly released My Passport™ Essential™ SE Portable USB Drives. Other applications include select notebooks and small form factor desktop PCs, where quiet and cool operation are important

Let’s just translate that into plain English, shall we? “Our drives are so thick that you’ll need a huge laptop to fit this in”. That’s exactly wat WD did: the drive is available in the My Passport Essential line of external hard drives. You can find the 1 TB model here.