Western Digital will release a 5 mm thin Hybrid HDD that uses both traditional magnetic storage and flash memory. The increasing popularity of Ultrabooks makes that manufacturers are looking for ways to make their hardware thinner. Western Digital is following this trend by releasing 500 GB HDDs that are only 5 mm in height. In 2008 a height of 9.5 mm was required for 500 GB capacity drives, last year that dropped to 7 mm and this year it dropped to 5 mm. This means that in five years time the height is almost halved.
The thinner formfactor is not the only novelty of these new discs. Western Digital will also add 32 GB of flash memory to the 500 GB drives. This new hybrid disk will be the WD Black SSHD. This series will have a line up of multiple discs that vary in capacity in both the magnetic part as the flash memory part. The drives may have a drawback, to use both the magnetic storage and the flash memory together the drive might need additional drivers for usage under Windows.
Western Digital hasn't released any information on this yet so it's unclear if they are indeed required and how this will influence the ease of installation. Another drawback of the drive is that it will only come with a special SATA connector only used in specific Ultrabooks. The WD Black drives were already showcased during CES 2013 in Las Vegas and will become available later this year, a specific date hasn't been announced yet.
