In a bid to make thinner and lighter portable devices, Western Digital did a breakthrough in design by coming up with the world’s first WD ultraslim 5mm hard drive. It is not only a slight improvement in the chassis but packed with better technology by coming up with a drive that is a hybrid of rotating mechanism with Nand Flash memory.

 

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.

 

Read more about it here – WD shrinks laptop drives to just 5mm thick

 

 

 Specifications of the Western Digital ultraslim 5mm hard disk

 

Ultra-slim Form Factor – 5 mm height with compact connector offers system designers a greater degree of chassis design freedom. This ultra-slim form factor reduces weight by up to 36 percent compared with a standard 9.5 mm drive.

Best-in-class Acoustics and Shock – WD’s best-in-class acoustics use technologies that reduce noise when the drive is active or idle. The WD Blue and WD Black 5 mm drives deliver unprecedented operation and non-operation shock specifications with 400 G and 1000G, respectively.

Edge Card Technology – WD designed the connector and board utilizing cell phone miniaturization technology to maximize the mechanical sway space in the hard drive and ensure shock performance.

Edge Card Connector – WD Blue 5 mm hard drives also feature the first application of a new small form factor SFF-8784 edge connector. This new connector receives power from and interfaces with the host I/O bus via the SATA interface connector SFF-8784.

StableTrac™ – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations which enables consistently higher performance.

Dual Stage Actuator – Leading-edge enterprise dual stage actuators provide two actuators that improve positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.

 

Read more about it here – WD® Shipping World’s First 5 mm 2.5-inch Hard Drive

 

 

Technologies of the WD ultraslim hard disk

 

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

WD’s new 5mm drive series.

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.

 

Read more about it here – WD shrinks laptop drives to just 5mm thick

 

 

 

The best part about such new ultraslim drives is that it does not cost a bomb. The retail price of the Blue model is set to go at $89 which is amazingly cheap for a new technology. Looks like we will be able to sweep truck loads of older hard disk which are bigger at flea mart prices.