subject: Western Digital Introduces 5mm Hybrid Hard Drive [print this page] Western Digital recently announced that it has started sampling new 5mm-thick hybrid 500GB hard drives, which are designed to be used in Ultrabooks. Hybrid drives, which utilise a small amount of solid-state storage together with a spinning hard drive platter, are developed to make systems feel speedy for keeping capacities up and expenses down relative to 'true' solid-state drives. This is a hybrid disk, which connects a traditional spinning hard drive to some NAND flash storage. The cache files are helped by the flash storage to speed up boot times, as well as, general responsiveness.
Western Digital has been shipping HDDs, which have 7mm thickness, for thin-profile notebooks at the start of this year. Traditionally, hard drives found in these devices have 9.5mm thickness. Therefore, the company's new hybrid 5mm-thick drives will need less space, which makes them ideal for svelte ultrabooks. The new hybrid 5mm-thick drives also have MLC NAND flash storage, which is a cheaper option to the more costly SLC NAND, because of its higher reliability. Thus, as a precautionary measure, the new hybrid drive features a tier-design process, where data from its NAND storage is safely backed up on the mechanical drive. This provides data redundancy advantages for the user along with preserving its NAND storage for optimum data caching performance.
According to Western Digital, it designed the new hybrid drive that is slim enough for integration into today's thinnest notebook computers that feature Instant-On and application performance quite similar to today's client solid state drives (SSDs). In order to get higher performance, Ultrabooks should either have 2 drive bays, out of which one is for the hard disk drive and the second is for a low-capacity solid-state drive (SSD) cache drive, or the single bay for a hybrid drive. The company said that unlike dual-drive designs, the hybrid technology offers single-unit design homogeneity, which Ultrabook system developers were demanding since a long time from the storage industry.
The development of this hybrid drive places Western Digital on a dissimilar path from Intel. Intel is rumored to be designing a new SSD function for ultrabook apps. It is expected that the new set of specifications is named Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF) and the company (Intel) targets to replace the current mSATA SSD specifications, because of its storage capacity extent. Western Digital has a head start in this contest; however, it is believed that there is enough market segmentation for ultrabooks, which will need these two forms of storage technology. NGFF of Intel could be aimed at ultrabooks, which feature completely flash storage solutions where users are prepared to pay higher cost premiums. Western Digital's new hybrid drive is used in ultrabooks that provide both performance and storage capacities, which will appeal to value conscious end-users.
by: ellakuok
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