Seagate Unveils Thinnest Notebook Drive

Thin is in at Seagate. The provider of hard disk drive and storage solutions is releasing what it calls the world’s thinnest 2.5-inch hard disk drive. Known as the Momentus Thin Drive, the drive is 7 mm in height, 25 percent slimmer than traditional 9.5mm 2.5-inch laptop hard drives.

Momentus Thin Drive is designed for use in laptops, netbooks, backup devices and other consumer electronic devices. According to Seagate, the new, slimmer drive offers significantly lower cost-per-gigabyte storage than solid state and 1.8-inch drives, which should enable a “new breed” of entry-level laptops.

In addition, Seagate is touting the positive impact Momentus Thin Drive can have on the growing netbook market. The vast majority of current netbooks feature 9.5mm hard drives, since solid state and 1.8-inch drives are largely cost-prohibitive for netbooks. Seagate’s new drive offers the potential of lowering the cost of storage for netbooks, thereby broadening their target audience. Seagate says the Thin Drive rivals traditional 2.5-inch drives in performance and power efficiency.

Distributed enterprises may have something to cheer about with the release of the Momentus Thin Drive. Increasingly, users are accessing distributed enterprises not only from home PCs, but from mobile points such as laptops, netbooks and even PDAs. Advances in technology have allowed the distributed enterprise user, and the knowledge that user possesses, to become more important than where the user is located. This has also resulted in business activities increasingly being performed with the aid of “consumer electronics.”

Advances in thin storage such as the Momentus Thin Drive hold the potential to give distributed enterprises even greater flexibility in offering full access to all users without having to worry about setting up specific touchpoints. As business becomes increasingly global and mobile, the storage capabilities of small, portable devices becomes increasingly important.

The Momentus Thin drive features two capacity points – 250GB and 160GB, an 8MB cache, a Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and a 5400RPM spin speed. The drive is scheduled to ship to Seagate’s OEM and integrator partners in January 2010.