14 DAY TRIAL // Western Digital sub-division HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, has released the highest-capacity hard disk drive that has a form factor of 2.5 inches and a thickness of 9.5 mm.
9.5 mm isn't the thinnest form factor for platter spinners. That would be 5 mm, and there is even a level in between, at 7 mm.
Nevertheless, 9.5 mm is the standard for mobile HDDs. All sorts of notebooks, ultrabooks in particular, use them.
The new model from HGST, Travelstar 5K1500, is the highest-capacity 9.5 mm ever because of its three platters.
The storage space of 1.5 TB is 50% more than the next best thing, and 200% more than single-disk 500 GB 7mm and 5mm options.
"Contrary to popular belief, the mobile hard drive market is not being replaced by SSDs," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST.
"We continue to invest in and serve both the traditional 9.5 mm and 7 mm thin and light HDD mobile markets as they offer the best cost-per-GB, performance and proven product reliability for high-capacity, mainstream, Ultrabook and A/V content creation notebook markets."
HGST's Travelstar 5K1500 will ship next month (June 2013), probably from Computex Taipei onwards. In addition to the normal model, there will be an EA model, plus an optional self-encrypting one (meets Trusted Computer Group (TCG) Opal Storage Security specification). The last two will only ship from Q3 though.
All of them have 32 MB of cache memory and, of course, the SATA III interface (SATA 6 Gbps).
For those wondering, EA stands for Enhanced Availability and is made for blade servers, network routers, video surveillance systems, etc.
"The PC continues to be an important productivity platform for content creators, who represent an echelon of users that value high-capacity portable storage," said John Rydning, research vice president for hard disk drives at IDC.
"HGST's new mobile 1.5 TB hard disk drive in a standard form factor for notebook PCs provides the highest capacity solution available today for users seeking more storage capacity inside their notebook PC."