Toshiba to ship laptop hard drives that offer capacities up to 750GB and 1TB during the 2nd and 3rd quarter of the year.

Awhile ago Western Digital released its top-capacity laptop hard drive, the Scorpio Blue, which is the first 2.5-inch hard drive to offer 1TB of storage. On Tuesday, Toshiba announced its own largest laptop hard drive to date, the MKxx65GSX, which caps at 640GB.

One of Toshiba’s new portable hard drives.

(Credit: CNET)

Though smaller in capacity, the new Toshiba hard drive has two advantages over the WD Scorpio Blue. First, it spins at 5400rpm as opposed to the 5200rpm of the WD, meaning it potentially has a faster throughput speed.

The new Toshiba drive also comes in the regular 9.5mm thickness and therefore will work in all applications where SATA 2.5-inch hard drives currently are used. The Scorpio Blue is 12.5mm thick and therefore only fits in laptops with a larger hard drive bay.

The new hard drive is built based on Toshiba’s new 320GB-per-platter design which, according to the company, reduces power consumption and heat dissipation by more than 80 percent compared with 3.5-inch hard drives of the same capacity. This helps save energy and prolong the life span of the drive.

…

The storage-capacity gap between laptop and desktop hard drives just shrank significantly.

Western Digital announced Monday two laptop drives that offer “extreme” amounts of storage: the Scorpio Blue 1TB and the Scorpio Blue 750GB. Prior to this announcement, the largest laptop hard drive available was 500GB.

Scorpio Blue

(Credit: Western

…

Synology, maker of the DS209+ that earned our Editors’ Choice award, unveiled Monday the DS409slim, its first advanced NAS server based on 2.5-inch laptop hard drives.

There are a few other NAS servers that use laptop hard drives, such as the Buffalo LinkStation Mini (most NAS servers use the …