As 2009 drew to a close, Seagate announced a 2.5in super-slim hard-drive with a 7mm profile - making it comfortably slimmer than standard 9.5mm or 12.5mm alternatives and a likely candidate for ultra-slim computers.
Available in capacities of up to 250GB and sporting a single platter with a 5,400rpm speed, backed by 8MB of cache, the drive has stood alone in the ultra-thin space. Now, though, Hitachi has cooked up something even better.
Hitachi's Travelstar Z7K320 crams 320GB into the same 7mm form factor, but then ups the ante by providing a 7,200rpm rotation speed and 16MB of cache. Hitachi claims the drive will consume 1.8W when reading/writing and 0.8W when idling - handy for low-power machines.
Due to be made available in August, Hitachi states "its strategy to make it price-competitive with standard 9.5mm products, should drive broad adoption."
We reckon it would make a lot of sense in something like Intel's Canoe Lake platform, designed to facilitate the use of incumbent Atom chips in thinner, sleeker netbooks.
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