The increasing popularity of ultrabooks demands for hard drives and solid-state drives to be manufactured in smaller form factors. Western Digital is one of the manufacturers involved with reducing the size of these disks.
The increasing popularity of ultrabooks demands for hard drives and solid-state drives to be manufactured in smaller form factors. Western Digital is one of the manufacturers involved with reducing the size of these disks.
5mm thick? Or should that be 5mm thin? Western Digital has blurred the lines between thick and thin with these drives and it’s no wonder when you see how small ultrabooks are getting. Western Digital really is a leading force in the hard drive market and these SSDHD’s are just another reason why.
However, what is possibly more amazing is just how much space they are able to squeeze onto these tiny drives. Western Digital hopes that soon they will be able to offer 500 GB of space on a 5mm drive down from the 7mm that was required for this type of space only just last year. To top this off they have also added 32 GB of flash memory to make this a Frankenstein’s monster of a drive. Naturally there will be other version, different combinations of flash and mechanical memory storage to suit your needs including the 1TB drive with 24 GB NAND flash as pictured below.
Special thanks to CNET for the images
However, these drives have their downside. In order to use the drives to their potential, special drivers will need to be installed for Windows which could make things tricky. They will also use a special SATA connector which will only be available on specific ultrabooks.
An exact release date has not been announced but they are rumoured to be available later this year.
Source: uk.hardware.info
