WD intros standard-height 2.5-inch 750GB Scorpio Blue HDD

Western Digital already shipped the industry's first 2.5-inch 1TB hard drive last summer, but unfortunately for most, it couldn't be used as a drop-in solution for upgrading one's laptop drive. The reason? It relies on an unorthodox 12.5mm height form factor, while the vast majority of laptops only support 9.5mm height drives. Now, the outfit has pushed out a 750GB Scorpio Blue, a 2.5-incher that does indeed utilize the standard height form factor, and while this here unit includes Advanced Format and WhisperDrive, the 5,400RPM spindle speed is admittedly disappointing. It's tough to argue with the $149 price, though, and it's available now if you've been hankering for more space within your mobile workhorse.

Toshiba announces 750GB and 1TB laptop HDDs, gives them awkward model names like MK7559GSXP

Time for us to welcome the world's most capacious 9.5mm-tall hard drive, the 750GB MK7559GSXP. Yeah, it's quite a mouthful, but then it's not every day that you come across a storage disk that packs data quite so tightly, so maybe this is a name worth remembering. Not only is Toshiba's new two-platter 5,400RPM beastie the first ever to rise above 640GB without expanding to the chunkier 12.5mm height profile, it's also claimed to be 14 percent more energy efficient than the Japanese company's previous biggest model. If you don't mind moving up to the 12.5mm class, Toshiba's also bringing out a new MKxx59GSM series, which can stretch all the way up to 1TB, thanks to fitting three platters into the 2.5-inch diagonal space. Samples of both will be distributed to system manufacturers by the end of April, with mass production following soon thereafter.