Tag: harddrive

WD ships 5mm Blue UltraSlim drive, enables thinner budget Ultrabooks

We were intrigued with the prospects of Western Digital’s 5mm Blue drive when we saw it last summer: finally, a 2.5-inch spinning disk thin enough to rival slimmer SSDs without the price premium of a hybrid like the WD Black SSHD . If you shared the same curiosity, you’ll be glad to hear that the finished product is shipping as the WD Blue UltraSlim. Device builders can now stuff 500GB into spaces that would exclude 7mm disks , yet pay just $89 for the privilege — a price low enough to let even frugal Ultrabooks shed some bulk. The 5mm disk reaches its miniscule dimensions through the use of a tiny edge connector that mates both power and a SATA interface, leaving more room for the drive machinery. We can’t guarantee that you’ll find a Blue UltraSlim in your next PC or set-top box when Western Digital hasn’t named any of its customers, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the wafer-like drive is commonplace in the near future. Filed under: Laptops , Storage Comments Source: Western Digital

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WD ships 5mm Blue UltraSlim drive, enables thinner budget Ultrabooks

Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models

Seagate has had some skin in the hybrid hard drive game for some time, but always in 2.5-inch wide versions — great for your laptop, not so much the cavernous spaces of a gaming tower. Its just-shipping Desktop SSHD fills that gap in a nearly literal sense. Along with slotting neatly into a 3.5-inch bay, the larger SSHD carries both 2TB of spinning storage and 8GB of flash to speed up disk-intensive tasks without throwing away capacity (or money) on a pure solid-state drive. It should be as much as four times faster than conventional desktop drives, Seagate claims. Whether or not that’s true, the firm isn’t neglecting its portable-owning friends: it’s shipping a new 1TB, regular-height Laptop SSHD and a 500GB, 7mm (0.28-inch) Laptop Thin SSHD, either of which is up to 40 percent faster than its predecessor. Seagate hasn’t mentioned pricing for any of the drives at this stage, although it’s safe to presume they’ll undercut SSDs with equivalent space. Filed under: Desktops , Laptops , Storage Comments Source: Seagate

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Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models