WD Unleashes World's Thinnest 2.5-inch HDD

[N.Broekhuijsen]

WD has announced the arrival of the world's first 5 mm 2.5" hard drive.

WD Unleashes World's Thinnest 2.5-inch HDD : Read more

 

[Gundam288]

The question is tho: How durable are they?

 

[dalethepcman]

I have been waiting for a cachable hdd/ssd combo that has a respectable amount of flash. The seagates while fine for the standard consumer / office user segment, do very little for workstation type workloads.

 

[southernshark]

This is a neat product. I wonder if anyone will put one in a tablet? I imagine so right?

 

[anonymous_user]

I wonder if the 5mm height would allow for lighter laptops to have multiple drives.

 

[guerrero]

The question is tho: How durable are they?

People dont have them yet so your going to have to wait a while

 

[cpatel1987]

@southernshark: I wouldn't want that in a tablet, its still part mechanical. I see a tablet as a device that will have induce more movement, wear and tear while its operating than say a laptop.

 

[ipwn3r456]

So I guess there is only 1 platter due to it's very thin size?

 

[InvalidError]

This is a neat product. I wonder if anyone will put one in a tablet? I imagine so right?

Two words: gyroscopic forces.

A tablet is very lightweight which makes it easy for people to suddenly turn it around. The strain this would put on the platter would be pretty harsh. The platter would likely be thin enough to bend in the process and this would add its own lot of potential complications. If you suddenly turned a HDD-based tablet in a direction perpendicular to the rotation plane (something you are unlikely to do with a laptop but fairly likely to do with a tablet), you could probably cause the platters to rip right off the spindle or cause enough platter wobble to rip the head off.

It may land in all-in-ones, ultrabooks and other compact form factors but I doubt these drives will make it into tablets. A 1.5-1.8" variant on the other hand would be much less susceptible to those mechanical stresses and could be viable for tablets.

 

[Arbie]

"Unleashes"? Overwrought, and a tiring style that wears out the language.

 

[g00fysmiley]

cool, I am in agreement tat it is liekly not meant for a tablet due to the fragile nature of mechanical drives... but i would love to see things liek the transformer tabs and keboard docs to have extended storage and a hdd this slim woudl fit the bill.