Seagate may be dipping its toes into solid state drives, but the company's not done innovating with the hard disk.
Seagate claims that its Momentus Thin hard disc drive, announced today and shipping in January, is the world's slimmest 2.5-inch HDD. It measures just 7 mm tall, roughly 25 percent smaller than the average 9.5 mm drive, VentureBeat reports. Those larger drives are used in nine out of 10 netbooks on the market today.
There's no word yet on pricing, but the idea is that these drives will cost roughly the same as competing drives, allowing for even thinner computers. Smaller drives, such as 1.8-inch HDDs and solid state drives, have mostly been missing from netbooks because their cost is considerably higher. Still, don't expect to see these new Seagate drives in any computer beyond netbooks and ultra-low voltage notebooks, because their only available capacities are 160 GB and 250 GB.
Other specs for the Momentus Thin include 8 MB cache, a 3 Gb per second Serial ATA interface and 5,400 rpm spin speed.
The timing is right for these new HDDs. The latest reports on Intel's Pine Trail platform say that the first netbooks with the new Intel chips are shipping soon. Benefits will include better performance and improved battery life. It's not known whether Seagate's drives will be featured in the first wave of new netbooks, but it's certainly possible, and it'd be nice to see netbooks with even thinner frames than the current generation.
Seagate recently announced that it's getting into the SSD business with 200 GB drives aimed at enterprise uses. The company hasn't said whether consumer-focused SSDs are next, but with its slimmer HDDs, and some netbooks and notebooks pushing a dozen hours of battery life, I'm okay with that.
