Toshiba Joins The 500 GB 2.5-Inch Single Platter HDD For Thin Laptops Club

The Register’s Chris Mellor reports that Toshiba has joined Seagate and WD in offering a single platter 500GB drive for thin notebooks and other compact devices, noting that the company’s new MQ01ABF HDD is essentially half of its MQ01ABD product – a 2-platter 2.5-inch drive with 1TB capacity, and similarly spins at 5,400rpm, has an 8MB cache and a 6Gbit/s SATA interface. However, unlike the 9.5mm MQ01ABD drive, the MQ01ABF is 7mm in thickness in its z-height measurement and weighs 92 grams.

Mellor reports that he MQ01ABF, which comes in 250GB and 320GB as well as 500GB variants and has a low noise level and good vibration resistance, and is to compete with Seagate’s single platter Momentus Thin (which offers a 7,200rpm 320GB model along with a 5,400rpm 500GB unit – both with a 16MB cache; and Western Digital’s 500GB single-platter, 5,400rpm Scorpio Blue with 6.8mm z-height. WD’s Hitachi GST subsidiary also offers a Travelstar Z5K500 with 500GB on a single platter spinning at 5,400rpm and a 7,200 RPM Z7K500 with a 32MB cache.

I would very much like it if Apple offered this type of ultrathin hard drive as an alternative to SSD storage in MacBook Airs and the new Retina MacBook Pros, but I’m not holding my breath. What have I got against SSD storage?

In a blog entry entitled “Why Is Solid-state Storage So Flimsy?” Mellor’s The Register colleague Alistair Dabbs notes that the baneful truth is that no matter how much storage space you get, and no matter how much you free up later on, it always gets stuffed to the gills, saying he’s worried that he under-specified the drive in his new notebook at half a terabyte, which is all the SSD capacity he could afford, leaving him reliant on a couple of USB portable drives to manage data overflow.

However, Dabbs says what’s really worrying him now is that it turns out SSD storage probably isn’t as rock-solid and reliable as he had imagined, and that despite all the advantages that SSD enjoys compared with a spinning hard disk, it has another one serious disadvantage besides astronomical prices, to wit:| “if something major goes wrong with the drive, the result for your data is nothing less than catastrophic.” Adding to the grim outlook, Flash Dabbs notes that Flash memory has a fixed lifetime, or at least decreasing performance over time.

In the meantime, he observes, internal hard disks are getting easier and easier to swap out as well as cheaper and cheaper, leaving him wondering why he was “so stupid as to put all my faith in a storage technology that’s so fragile, short-term and expensive?”

Good question, and one I’m wrangling with myself apropos my next laptop system upgrade.