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.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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voodoobunny Take the Asus X202e (11.6", Core i3, 500GB hard drive, less than $450). This could help make it even sleeker without pushing the price out of reach.Reply
This really could strengthen the class of "almost-ultrabooks". -
voodoobunny brandonjclark: I do! Not everyone can afford a $1000 ultrabook with all-solid-state storage, and this will allow manufacturers to create laptops that are close-to-ultrabook form factors with enough storage for regular people, at prices that regular people can afford.Reply -
sundragon Solid state drives have their place - disk based drives still have a use - Kudos to Seagate for continuing their development!Reply -
vmem hmm, an additional use could be to double this up and turn one 9mm drive slot into 2? some of the older laptops on the market should have room to do this, I donnoReply -
Cy-Kill WD has a 1TB 7mm HDD coming out, so why would I want something that may be 2mm thinner and half the capacity!Reply -
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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.10907657 said:Well this sucks. Who the hell wants a spinning HDD in their laptop anymore?
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. -
corbeau I tend to agree more with brandon than others. Yes traditional HDDs have their place, but come on, we see SSDs only in high end parts, and that is just not necessary. Why don't we have laptops with 128gb SSDs for under $600? It's not just about boot time, but also durability, especially in smaller form factors.Reply
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. -
RobAC So tiny and soo cute.Reply
*ahem*
I likes it. Still waiting for SSD prices to meet or beat the GB/$$ ratio of mechanical HDs.
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itsnotmeitsyou this also might make mobile RAID more viable. Pinning Raid-0 would boost your performance which is nice, but given higher chance of failure in mobile, Raid 1 would also be compelling.Reply