Intel Promotes 5mm Thin Hard Drives For Ultrabooks

VR-Zone’s LG Nilsson says if you thought Western Digital’s new 7mm slim, 500GB Scorpio Blue laptop HDD was an impressive achievement, it’s only the start of what’s to come. Nilsson notes that at the recent Beijing Intel Developer Forum, the company was pushing for an even slimmer 5mm mobile hard drive standard, or 28 percent smaller in terms of volume.

Nilsson notes that his colleagues at VR-Zone Chinese snapped a picture of what Intel is hoping for during a presentation, and observes that despite SSDs being popular in Ultrabooks, for many users 128 or 256GB is simply not enough capacity and it’s not always convenient to carry around an external hard drive with you, so, the company is proposing a new hard drive standard with a SATA interface that will be less than a quarter of the size of today’s SATA interface and moved from a fairly central position on the drive, onto one of the corners. However, he says that Intel isn’t expecting the SATA-IO to be ready until Q4 of this year at best.

As for drawbacks of going ultra-slim, they will include further physical and mechanical limitations, and it will be impossible to put more than a single platter in a 2.5-inch, 5mm thick drive, but Nilsson says Intel is expecting that there will be 1TB 5mm drives in 15mm thin Ultrabooks by 2015.

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