Seagate Launches 5 mm Laptop Hard Drives
Seagate has launched a new hard drive lineup, the Laptop Ultrathin HDD.
Seagate is launching a new series of hard drives, the Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDDs. These hard drives are barely 5 mm thick and weigh just 3.3 oz. Capacities will reach 500 GB. The drives will come in a 2.5" form factor.
"The new Seagate Laptop Ultrathin truly raises the bar, enabling us to finally create high-capacity, thin and light laptops that consumers crave at mass-market price points they can afford," said S.Y. Shian, corporate vice president and general manager of Asus' notebook business unit. "The drive's capacity, coupled with its ultra-slim, lightweight footprint, empowers our engineers to think out of the box and create truly ground-breaking, innovative system designs- it's a win- win for both us and the consumer."
The drives will spin at 5400 RPM, carry 16 MB of cache, have a 5.6 ms average latency, and have sustained data transfer rates of up to 100 MB/s. The drives' power consumption will be no more than 1.4 W.
Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin 500 GB hard drive will cost an MSRP of $89. Numerous manufacturers, among which are Dell and Lenovo, should start employing the units soon.

This really could strengthen the class of "almost-ultrabooks".
HDDs still have 4-5X better $/GB so for people who tend to hoard data but do not mind longer OS/application load times, HDDs still make plenty of sense.
At 5mm thin/thick though, I would start worrying about whether or not the HDD's frame, lid and platter have sufficient rigidity to guarantee their structural integrity during shipping and handling both of the drives themselves and assembled laptop/whatever.
That said, Seagate isn't really an SSD company and there could be a use for some use for these small drives so good job Seagate.
*ahem*
I likes it. Still waiting for SSD prices to meet or beat the GB/$$ ratio of mechanical HDs.
But four of these in RAID10 would be feasible in a normal sized laptop. Even two of them in RAID1 would fit in this tiny Samsung Chromebook
I hope to see 4 platters with 12.5mm thickness some time.
Have you heard of having Helium in the drive instead of air? There was an article on that a while ago but I don't think that is the case here.
They were able to do this by shrinking the thickness of the PCB and also by shrinking parts of the internals, but, the distance between the platters aren't any closer, supposedly.
I also wonder about access times! Typically 3-platter + mobile drives has access times near 20ms average! Very slow at multitasking. Better be a hybrid drive with write caching abilities. But maybe they'll be able to keep it decent at around 15-16ms average access times.
I also wonder why they chose to do this now rather than earlier. They must really be having problems increasing areal density via HAMR or SMR.
Exciting stuff.