When it comes to your notebook computer everything is a compromise. The performance of everything from the CPU inside to the hard drives and video cards are a compromise of performance for battery life and vice versa. The trick is to get a good balance of performance while still getting good battery life.

Western Digital announced today that its line of Scorpio Black 2.5-inch SATA notebook HDDs are now available. This line of drives gives high performance with a 7200 RPM rotational speed, but adds some technology to help reduce the battery power needed and increase the runtime of the notebook.

If you thought you had a big drive in a small package with Western Digital’s 250GB Passport you can think again. Hopefully you’ve come to expect it these days because soon after you get the biggest and the best something else will come along to out-do it.

WD has announced the launch of the latest in their line of the sleek, portable Passport drives with this one boasting a massive 320GB capacity of storage that is small enough to fit in your shirt pocket. The whole drive and enclosure weigh under a quarter of a pound does not require an external power source. The drive gets its power and transfers data through a single USB 2.0 connection and gives a 480 Mbps transfer speed (which will take you an hour and a half to fill the drive).

Western Digital is betting those seeking 2.5-inch, 9.5mm form factor hard drives (notebook computers, portable storage devices) want larger storage options for their data needs. To this end the company has just introduced the WD Scorpio 320GB hard drive, priced at around $200.

The WD Scorpio 320GB hard drive offers up a rather speed performance time of 3Gb/s transfer rate. It reportedly is also extremely quiet for a 5400 RPM drive of its type because of special WD seeking algorithms. You also get your typical shock guard protection and a secondary technology which “calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.”

This week the news seems to be all about hard drive manufacturers pushing the limits and getting big results. Today Western Digital announced that it broke a record for hard drive density. They accomplished the milestone by using their own perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR)/tunneling magneto-resistive (TuMR) technology, and achieved 520 Gb/in2 areal density in a demonstration. Why is this important? Because, this is the highest density ever reached using continuous media. It produces a 3.5-inch hard drive that stores 640 GB per platter as well as single hard drive capacities as large as 3 TB. If you are doing the math, that’s more than double today’s max of 200 GB per square inch.

Following an earlier demonstration in California, they announced the news this week at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo. As usual you won’t be able to get one overnight.(Though that would be nice.) They estimate a release date sometime in 2010.

Western Digital has unveiled some new features and a new look to its line of external My Book hard drives. The Home Edition, Office Edition and Essential Edition 2.0 all offer up to 1TB of data storage along with a compact design and are smart enough to power themselves off when you computer shuts down.

Both the Home and Office editions have also traded in the light ring on the front for a straight bar that not only indicates power but gives you an estimate of available capacity at a glance. They also house a backup feature that will automatically back up anything that’s saved to it.

Western Digital announced today that they are expanded their My Book lineup of external storage devices to include larger capacities of 750GB and 1.5TB.

With all the multi-media content available in higher HD quality and at more reasonable prices, the desire for more storage increases as well. This external drive can be used for to keep HD movies, photos or just for backing up computers or data. The My Book line from Western Digital has a plug and play setup and the My Book …