Western Digital released an ultrabook-compatible hard drive disk that aims to provide large storage sizes. The company said this will remove the trend for low-capacity and highly-priced hard drives.

The ultrabook-compatible HDDs are affordable, with the 320GB and 500GB versions costing $79 and $99 respectively.

The new hard drives feature Western Digital ShockGuard Technology, which protects the devices from 400Gs of shock from drops. The device is compatible with standard 9.5mm notebook slots. The device uses Western Digital's WhisperDrive Technology to ensure silence, while boasting a long battery life with "state-of-the-art" seeking algorithms and "advanced power management" features lengthening battery life.

The device also uses Western Digital's SecurePark technology.

"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, and improved non-operational shock tolerance," Western Digital revealed on its website.

Western Digital said that it has performed test on hundreds of devices and across a range of platforms in the company's FIT Lab and Mobile Compatibility Lab.

The company added that the drive is optimized for Mac, Windows Vista and Windows 7 devices with a clean install. Installing the device on a Windows machine may require users to run the WD Align Windows software utility if the operating system is running on a partition or the drive is a secondary drive, which allows older operating systems to run at full performance on Advanced Format HDDs. The utility takes about 20 minutes to complete on new installations with no data files. The company's advice is to connect all USB peripherals before running the software utility.

For Mac machines, the utility isn't needed.

Western Digital said Advanced formatting allows hard drives to take advantage of new operating systems, allowing manufacturers to design bigger hard drives.

The company recommends using Intel drive version 9.6 or later if running Windows Vista or Windows 7, with no driver updates needed for AMD chips, while the company said to visit Microsoft's support page for more information on Nvidia chips.

(reported by Jonathan Charles, edited by Dave Clark)