WD shrinks laptop drives to just 5mm thick

Western Digital is now shipping what it calls the world's slimmest laptop drive series. The drives are just 5mm, or about one-fifth of an inch, thick -- 2mm slimmer than any other 2.5-in form factor drives to date.

The WD Blue Ultra Slim notebook drive.

Most 2.5-in laptop drives are are 9.5mm or 7mm high and have two platters. The new drive has a single, 500GB platter, WD said.

The new drive series includes the WD Blue hard disk drive and WD Black SSHD (solid-state hybrid drive), which combines NAND flash with traditional spinning disk.

Both offer 500GB of storage capacity.

"Our engineering team took a clean-sheet approach with 5 mm to deliver an ultra-thin hard drive that enables a world of possibilities and applications for mobile computing and beyond," Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD's client computing business unit, said in a statement.

The new drives are designed to allow for smaller device slots for netbooks or ultrabooks.

WD's new 5mm drive series.

The 5mm height and a new small form factor SFF-8784 edge connector gives system designers a greater degree of chassis design freedom and reduces weight by up to 36% compared to a standard 9.5mm drive.

WD Blue 5mm hard drives also feature the first application of the SFF-8784 edge connector, which receives power from and connects with the host I/O bus via the SATA interface connector SFF-8784.

The WD Blue and WD Black 5mm drives also sport new operation and non-operation shock specifications offering 400G and 1000G of resilience, respectively.

A height comparison from left to right: 9.5mm, 7mm and 5mm drives.

One method WD uses to reduce noise and internal vibration is something it calls StableTrac. The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read/write operations. That also enables consistently higher performance.

The WD Blue version (model: WD5000MPCK) has a suggested retail price of $89 and is covered by a two-year limited warranty.

The WD Black SSHD are already shipping to system manufacturers and integrators, with more information about the drives available on the company's website.