WD Intros 'World's Thinnest' 2.5-inch Hybrid Hard Drive

Western Digital is now sampling 5-mm hybrid drives to OEMs.

Western Digital (WD) said on Monday that it's currently sampling 5mm-thin hybrid hard disk drives designed to fit within super-thin notebooks (AKA Ultrabooks, etc). These new drives promise SSD-like instant-on and application performance on top of the typical high capacity and low price point traits offered by traditional HDD.

"Mobile devices are becoming smaller, thinner, lighter and more responsive," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage solutions at WD. "Working with our technology partners, WD has developed new 5 mm hard drives that enable high capacity storage along with excellent performance and superior economics to allow our customers to expand their thin offerings."

WD's hybrid tech contains two components: MLC NAND flash storage for SSD-like data throughput and instant-on responsiveness, and magnetic disks for efficient, high-capacity storage. The combined tech will manage data in tiers, throwing the "hot", highly-used data onto the NAND flash chips and the less-used "cold" data on the silver platters.

"The tiered design of hybrid hard drives, compared to current dual-drive solutions, also provides a redundancy benefit for users," WD said. "The magnetic disk backs up all files residing in the NAND, protecting the user from inevitable NAND wear and preserving it for the more hot data handling. WD’s hybrid technology works in conjunction with the PC operating system to deliver higher performance than current hybrid offerings while minimizing NAND wear to allow the use of less expensive MLC NAND."

Unlike other hybrid solutions, WD claims that its new drives provide a single-unit design. Even more, they're smaller than the super-thin 7-mm HDDs WD's began shipping for Ultrabooks and other super-thin notebooks earlier this year. In comparison, 2.5-inch HDDs typically measure 9.5-mm, thus the new hybrids utilize almost 50-percent less volume.

WD said the new drives will be showcased during WD’s Investor Day, Sept. 13, 2012.

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