For size comparison, the 5mm hard-disk. How much longer will rotary drives exist? (via Western Digital)
Thin is in. At least Western Digital thinks so as the hard-drive company recently announced their sampling of a 5mm thick (down from 7mm introduced earlier this year) hybrid hard-drive for notebook PCs. As notebooks become thinner and more efficient so too must the technology so component manufacturers must design their gear with 'weight-loss' in mind. Hard-drives for mobile devices, such as laptops and ultra-books, are typically 9.5mm thick, which limits note-book makers from downsizing their products as a result Western Digital re-designed their 7mm drive to a much smaller 5mm. In order to accomplish this feat, and make the drives faster and more efficient, WD combined ‘instant-on’ platters of typical hard-disks with MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory which gives the hybrids SSD-like speed for information through-put. This is known as ‘tiered-storage’ and is designed to make magnetic platter drives faster by utilizing the NAND memory for faster page-file access for data used more frequently (hot data) while lesser used programs are accessed from the platters. This let WD pack more drive space, to the tune of 500GB, into a super-thin package for the next gen notebooks. As it stands right now Acer has taken advantage of Western Digital’s new hybrid drives but you can expect others to follow suit and we’re likely to see their new hybrid drives included in notebooks by early next year.
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