At the Technology Showcase yesterday during IDF I got see in person the new Western Digital hybrid hard drives that will combine a single platter spinning disk with a NAND flash for a hybrid solution at under 5mm thick.
You can see that is barely enough z-height for a standard installation screw and this will really help get larger amounts of storage into thinner devices. WD will have it available in 500GB and 1TB versions though the 1TB model will come in a slightly higher 7mm variety.
The WD Blue models will be spinning disk only while the WD Black will combine as much as 32GB of flash memory but it could vary based on the specific OEM request and considerations.
Another requirement of this new form factor is the need for a new connector, conveniently named SFF-8038, that handles both power and data.
We are still waiting for pricing information, but another wave of hybrid technology looks to be on its way!
I hope the proprietary
I hope the proprietary connector comes with a well designed adapter.
Does it come with a 1 year
Does it come with a 1 year warranty and a free loogey hocked directly in to your face like their other drives?
I’m way too happy with my Samsung 830 256 gig drive. Best of all it comes with a 5 year warranty and no deliberately crippling of the drive’s RAID capabilities above and beyond what’s inherent in SSDs.
I need one for my neuronet
I need one for my neuronet processor.
I know for a fact that the
I know for a fact that the 7MM formfactor doesn’t *need* a new connector. I’m not saying that these drives won’t have it, just that you can quite easily fit standard SATA onto 7MM since I have several 7MM drives that have it. It’s such a shame really. I said in the comments of the post that Scott made about these that I’d only be interested in one if it had more than 8GB of nand so 20/30GB is appealing, but they had to take what would have been a very compelling product for me (And surely quite a few other consumers) and more or less make it completely unusable because of the connector. Justifying it’s inclusion by only selling it to OEM’s is silly because at the end of the day they control who they sell to.