Seagate to Release World's Thinnest 2.5-inch HDD
Seagate shaves 2.5 mm from laptop drives.
As our devices get slimmer in form factor, the demand rises for the miniaturization of components. Storage hardware, however, is standardized to several sizes, with 9.5 mm being the typical height for the 2.5-inch drives used in laptops and notebooks.
System designers wanting something slimmer than 9.5 mm can turn to 1.8-inch drives or SSD, but that in turn drives up costs. Seagate believes that it has the perfect answer to this with its upcoming line of Momentus Thin hard drives it plans to launch next week.
The storage company has created what it touts as the world's thinnest 2.5-inch laptop drive, measuring in with a 7 mm height. Seagate says that its solution provides the lowest-cost storage for netbooks and thin laptops, enabling computer makers to offer systems that reach a broader market.
The Momentus Thin will feature two capacity points – 250GB and 160GB – both packing an 8MB cache, a Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and a 5400RPM spin speed. The drive will be available to Seagate’s OEM and integrator partners in January 2010.
Follow us on Twitter for more tech news and exclusive updates here.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
-
leafblower29 Hmmm... interesting to see the speeds of read/write. Perhaps size could allow RAID in laptops.Reply -
Efrayim Wow that's thin. I bet they could make it thinner if they weren't restricted by the SATA connector height.Reply -
metalfellow Impressive work seagate. This might cause headaches if owners want to upgrade to a larger capacity and they don't realise the drive is only 7mm high rather than the normal 9.5mm. Guess that could be solved by having a label to identify this as "super-slim 2.5in hdd" or something similar.Reply -
rigaudio Oh please, it was gonna be said eventually.Reply
Anyways, I hope they managed to slice the price as well as the drive. -
Sicundercover What concerns me is why bother putting all the time into R&D to make a analog device like this?Reply -
nawat leafblower29Hmmm... interesting to see the speeds of read/write. Perhaps size could allow RAID in laptops.Toshiba's been offering RAID in laptops for quite a long time now with its Qosmio series. But it's not in all models and these laptops are huge and heavy.Reply -
Gin Fushicho Give me a 7200rpm single platter 250GB one of those and i'll be one happy boy. ;)Reply