The current 9.5mm-tall 2.5-inch drives are too tall for some laptop designers, and they want to go slimmer without turning to more expensive measures such as 1.8-inch drives and solid state drives. The perfect solution? Seagate’s Momentus Thin hard drives that are set to launch sometime this week for developers to get their hands on to.
The “world’s thinnest 2.5-inch hard drive” is 7mm high and is set to be a low cost solution for netbooks and ultraportables that want thinness, cheapness and capacity. The drives will come in 160GB and 250GB configurations, both with 8MB of cache and spinning at 5,400RPM on the SATA 3Gb/s interface. OEMs should start seeing these drives early next year, with laptops to follow.
