Western Digital is working on a paper-thin hard drive
The 2,5-inch drive is 5 millimeters thick and has a capacity of 500 GB.
The super-thin hard drive is meant to break down the high prices of Ultrabooks as it moves orders of magnitude higher by the price of an SSD of similar capacity. Western Digital is well aware that HDDs will no longer be particularly attractive in terms of speed in 2012, which is why, for example, the Seagate Momentus XT (32GB) was also spliced with MLC NAND flash memory.
The idea is simple, but great: a hybrid hard drive combines the benefits of traditional storage and SSDs. The most frequently used files and programs are stored in the high-speed flash memory, while the rarely used files can be unloaded onto the slow disk without any problems. In fact, WD didn’t have much choice, as an Ultrabook sets very high performance requirements (boot time, return from hibernation, etc.), which is essentially the only way to meet it.
Source: HOC
