Western Digital Creates Super Thin 5mm Hybrid Hard Drive Discussion

WD just announced the creation of their new hybrid hard drive technology, which combines super fast SSD storage with traditional rotating media.

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Too many variants of 2.5inch. 2.5inch/9.5mm was good, then some idiot decided to make 7mm drives, now 5mm... This is getting ridiculous. Standards are nice because they are standard.

 

There's more variety than that. I have a 19mm thick 1.4GB Toshiba MK2720FC while 12.5mm drives were made until recently.

But the HDD manufacturers have been sleeping on the matter of raising the capacity of a standard 9.5mm drive above 1TB.

John

 

I agree that it's frustrating when you want to upgrade a hard drive or SSD in your notebook and you have to check 14 times to see if the drive you want to buy will fit in your notebook. Unfortunately, the overwhelming pressure among all notebook manufacturers is to make laptops thinner, then thinner that that, and thinner still.

The typical 2.5-inch hard drive standard is just too thick for some of these new laptop designs and even the diminutive mSATA standard (and more specifically the mSATA connector) might be too thick for many new ultrathin laptops. Other than the obvious things like Optical drives and large ports, the three components that are having the most trouble fitting inside new designs are storage, system RAM and batteries.

I know it makes me sound like an old timer, but I'd rather have a "slightly" thicker laptop with a storage drive and RAM that I can easily replace and a fatter battery that provides great battery life.

 

Agreed in full; that is why I like the true "ultraportables" - chiefly the ThinkPad X and some of the now-ancient Fujitsu P series. They were not especially thin but as user accessible as a 'normal' notebook.

The thinness craze is driving the industry to extremes as a 5mm thin hard drive illustrates. It is the style, but IMO it's all about the physical size of the notebook (width/height). I couldn't travel with an 0.5" thin 17" notebook as easily as I could with a 1.2" thick 15.6".

 

I've tried a range of the ultraportables over the years but they end up not getting used much because of the small screens either offering limited real estate or small text my eyes can't handle. I'm now happily using a Samsung NP900X4C which, to the layman, looks like an impossible combination of a big screen, a keyboard, enormous touchpad and a palmrest without the obvious thickness to contain everything else needed to make the computer work. A 5mm thick HDD would provide the option to shrink the big battery (needed as a counterweight to stop the computer tipping over backwards) and provide some bulk storage to supplement the mSATA SSD. That said, the steady drop in SSD prices (and 512GB mSATA in the pipeline), makes reverting to the more power-hungry and fragile mechanical storage look increasingly less attractive.

And I find that a large, but slim, notebook fits into the baggage quite easily. That said, Samsung have used a non-standard 15" screen in my NP900X4C that enables the computer being a size smaller than the 15.6" machines so it fits in with the documents more easily.

John