HDD manufacturers to capture Ultrabook market with 5mm drives

With the growing popularity of Ultrabooks or ultra thin laptops, it has become of the utmost importance to be able to provide mass storage in a small form factor. Currently SSDs do not really do that, 7mm 2.5″ SSDs are sometimes too big and mSATA SSDs are too small to fit more than 250GB of storage in.

As a consequence hard drive manufacturers are looking to innovate and come up with a solution to the problem – 5mm hard drives. Although this is something we’d like to see straight away if its to have maximum effect, the 5mm hard drive is still in the design phase meaning there is a long way to go yet – possibly over a year depending on the speed of innovation.

(5mm hard drives do currently exist, but in the 1.8″ form factor, with really low SSD-like capacities and are mainly ancient)

Hybrid drives are believed to be the best rival to the 5mm drives and the SSD, offering the best of both worlds – although Hybrid drives still require a hard drive and if a hard drive is too big – then its too big. So it seems the 5mm hard drive has a viable future irrespective of other developments. We think the future of the mSATA SSD is not so bright and this could be the nail in the coffin for those.

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