WD Unleashes World's Thinnest 2.5-inch HDD

By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

WD has announced the arrival of the world's first 5 mm 2.5" hard drive.

Back in February we showed you a rumor regarding WD's 5 mm thin hybrid hard drives, and now WD has delivered.

Two versions will be hitting the market, currently only in 500 GB variants. For starters, a plain hard drive will arrive. It is the WD5000MPCK, otherwise known as the WD Blue 5 mm ultra slim drive. Due to its thinness, it should be very appropriate for use in ultrabooks and ultraportables, unlike thicker 7 mm or 9.5 mm 2.5" hard drives, which are too bulky and take up too much room.

The second version that will arrive is the WD Black SSHD. While little has been detailed about it, we know that it'll come in at least a 500 GB version and carry a bit of onboard NAND to act as a caching SSD. The amount of NAND memory remains unknown, but the rumor from February indicated that it would carry around 24 GB.

These two drives will also be some of the first that will feature the SFF-8784 edge connector.

MSRP pricing for the 500 GB 5 mm 2.5" WD Blue drive will be $89, with no word yet on pricing for the WD Black SSHD models.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Gundam288
    The question is tho: How durable are they?
    Reply
  • dalethepcman
    I have been waiting for a cachable hdd/ssd combo that has a respectable amount of flash. The seagates while fine for the standard consumer / office user segment, do very little for workstation type workloads.
    Reply
  • southernshark
    This is a neat product. I wonder if anyone will put one in a tablet? I imagine so right?
    Reply
  • anonymous_user
    I wonder if the 5mm height would allow for lighter laptops to have multiple drives.
    Reply
  • guerrero
    10708567 said:
    The question is tho: How durable are they?

    People dont have them yet so your going to have to wait a while
    Reply
  • cpatel1987
    @southernshark: I wouldn't want that in a tablet, its still part mechanical. I see a tablet as a device that will have induce more movement, wear and tear while its operating than say a laptop.
    Reply
  • ipwn3r456
    So I guess there is only 1 platter due to it's very thin size?
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    10708735 said:
    This is a neat product. I wonder if anyone will put one in a tablet? I imagine so right?
    Two words: gyroscopic forces.

    A tablet is very lightweight which makes it easy for people to suddenly turn it around. The strain this would put on the platter would be pretty harsh. The platter would likely be thin enough to bend in the process and this would add its own lot of potential complications. If you suddenly turned a HDD-based tablet in a direction perpendicular to the rotation plane (something you are unlikely to do with a laptop but fairly likely to do with a tablet), you could probably cause the platters to rip right off the spindle or cause enough platter wobble to rip the head off.

    It may land in all-in-ones, ultrabooks and other compact form factors but I doubt these drives will make it into tablets. A 1.5-1.8" variant on the other hand would be much less susceptible to those mechanical stresses and could be viable for tablets.
    Reply
  • Arbie
    "Unleashes"? Overwrought, and a tiring style that wears out the language.
    Reply
  • g00fysmiley
    cool, I am in agreement tat it is liekly not meant for a tablet due to the fragile nature of mechanical drives... but i would love to see things liek the transformer tabs and keboard docs to have extended storage and a hdd this slim woudl fit the bill.
    Reply