When you look at it from the side, Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin HDD is almost easy to miss. Measuring just 5 mm tall, it’s one of the thinnest hard drives in existence. We got our hands on the 500 GB model to see if it can keep up with larger disks.
Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin HDD is about as thick as a stack of six credit cards. Let that sink in. With a Z-height of 5 mm, the hard drive is just over half as thick as the 9.5 mm you expect from a typical 2.5" disk, and those are already pretty darned thin. Additionally, these drives weigh in at 93 g. So, not only are they crazy-tiny, but they're also ultra-light, too. This should be exciting news for the folks who want plenty of capacity from their mobile devices, but are still sensitive to cost (as in, they can't necessarily afford a 256 GB or 512 GB SSD). Naturally, then, Seagate is aiming its newest Laptop Ultrathin HDDs at small laptops and Ultrabooks.
Other than its form factor and weight, the Laptop Ultrathin HDD's other technical specifications are fairly similar to its peers. The drive family employs one platter spinning at 5400 RPM, features 16 MB of data cache, and communicates across a 6 Gb/s SATA interface.
The line-up is three models strong, including the 320 GB ST320LT030, the 500 GB ST500LT032, and, another 500 GB version that sports automatic encryption. According to Seagate, the latter is compliant with Trusted Computing Group standards for Full Disk Encryption.
Of course, as we know, just because a product's technical specifications look familiar doesn't mean that measured performance is going to sync up. Let's have a look at how Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin HDD stacks up to the thicker competition.
- Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin HDD Is A Sight...
- Laptop Ultrathin HDD Tech Specs And Benchmark System
- Results: Sequential Read And Write Performance, And Interface Bandwidth
- Results: 4 KB Random Read And Write Performance
- Results: Access Times And I/O Performance
- Results: PCMark 7
- Results: Power Consumption And Efficiency
- A Good Choice For Small Laptops And Ultrabooks


for example http://i.imgur.com/VXwTs6y.jpg
it only takes about 3 seconds to do (even faster if you are in the process of making the chart and not changing colors in post)
for example http://i.imgur.com/VXwTs6y.jpg
it only takes about 3 seconds to do (even faster if you are in the process of making the chart and not changing colors in post)
Think you meant 9.5mm there.
At least it's not got proprietary connectors like the WD 5mm ones do. Think you need to add one of those to the benchmarks though - it's Seagate's biggest competition.
Regular thickness drives are $60-80 and this one is mentioned to be under $100 with no price given for the consumer market. I wouldn't mind paying a small premium for a drive that utilizes 53% of the area of a 9.5mm drive.
More expensive, more slower
More expensive, more slower
Nope, ultrabooks often have 7mm slots or none, and soon I'd expect that to be 5mm.
Who said anything about a HDD cage?
Allowing for a lot of extra storage, or RAID 1 bulk storage since it is common place for laptops to use SSD's now but it is also well known that you should always backup your important data and keep bulk data off of the SSD. (SSD= OS and applications only)
Remember the old wash tub disk drive disk packs? Even they were only like 6" tall tho'.
You can get an answer to your question in an article on this subject - the article on this page (if you read it)
The current hard drive based ipods use 1.8" 1 platter drives, not sure of the thickness, 7mm?
so they'd have to have a larger chassis in length/width but not as much thickness.
With current platter densities, Apple could put in a 250GB 1.8" 1 platter drive in their ipods
I'm more interested in reliability than speed.
One would suspect 1 platter to be more reliable than 2, 3, or 4 platters.
The article doesn't mention how many heads, 1 or 2.
Again, I suspect 1 head more reliable than 2 heads.
Unfortunately, Tomshardware can't test 5 year reliability, but there might be data somewhere on improved reliability of 1 platter and of 1 head.