14 DAY TRIAL // Hard disk drive makers have somehow managed to profit from the consequences of the Thai floods of last year, selling HDDs at twice or three times the normal price due to shortages, but they haven't managed to hop over a certain other hurdle.
We are, of course, referring to the market of ultrathin and ultralight mobile personal computers, commonly referred to as Ultrabooks (Intel insisted).
One problem that has made it difficult to make ultrabooks cheap enough for mass sales was the storage.
Since ultrabooks need to be thin, they can't use the HDDs common on the notebook segment. That only leaves solid-state drives (hybrid drives are just as thick as HDDs).
Unfortunately, SSDs are still very expensive and, though fast, less capacious than hard disks.
Thus, the only barrier between hard drives and ultrabooks is that of physical size.
Designers and manufacturers of HDDs have reportedly decided to invest a great deal of resources and effort into developing 5mm-thick storage devices.
We would have said “time and effort,” but the whole point is to create the units as quickly as possible, so HDD players cannot, in fact, afford to take it slowly.
Nevertheless, the process will have to follow several steps. Currently, developers are in design stage, meaning that a real push won't be possible for some time.
There is also the unfortunate reality that hybrid drives will be rivals rather than temporary placeholders for 5mm HDDs.
Magnetic drives with integrated NAND Flash memory already exist and will become a significant foil to regular HDDs starting in 2013.
True, they are more expensive, but also faster, so the price difference is justified. Furthermore, if HDD players do create 5mm drives, the compact size will come at a cost, so whatever size advantage is achieved could be negated by the higher sum of money needed to acquire each one.
It may very well be that the IT players will be forced to “compromise”: make only 5mm Hybrid HDDs for ultrabooks, instead of regular platter spinners.