Toshiba to Sample 2-Platter 7mm HDDs in November
Naturally, as laptops get thinner with each generation, storage suppliers are pushing the form factor envelope as well, making thinner drives while packing equal if not greater storage capacities. The storage arm of Toshiba revealed on Tuesday a new series of 2.5 inch hard drives measuring just 7 mm thick, the MQ02ABF series, perfect for Ultrabooks and super-slim notebooks.
"The MQ02ABF series fulfills our customers' desire for a high capacity 7 mm form factor HDD required for today's thin and light laptops," said Don Jeanette, senior director of product marketing at Toshiba's Storage Products Business Unit.
According to the specs, these new hard drives arrive with only two platters, a rigid chassis design, and dual stage head positioning technology. The drives connect via SATA 3 (6 Gb/s), have a 5,400 RPM rotational speed, and four read/write heads. Additional features include a 12 ms average seek time, a weight of 0.218 pounds, and a total measurement of 2.75 x 3.93 x 0.275 inches. The 1 TB drive is the MQ02ABF100 model; the 750 GB drive is the MQ02ABF075 model.
"We continue to focus on delivering a wide range of storage devices that enhance the computing experience, and we believe this newest addition to Toshiba's HDD product line will deliver the features our customers need," Jeanette added.
The new drives are likely to appear in lower cost notebooks, packing capacity rather than extreme performance. Toshiba said it will begin sampling these drives sometime in November.

Food for though: I have taken apart many HDD's including 7mm ones - these HDD platters are very fragile - they actually shatter like glass - where as regular 3.5" HDD's platters just bend. What this means is that 7mm HDD's are more prone to damage caused by sudden accidental drops which obviously is bad for Tablets or notebooks. I know because I've replaced many laptop HDD's due to accidental drops (anywhere from 1 to 4 feet off the ground).
I would gladly pay for slightly less storage space for more robustness (SSD). Not to mention - the speed benefits of SSDs are great even on the lower end scale.