WD Releases a 5mm 500GB Ultra Slim HD

[Bart Katz]

Western Digital releases a 5mm 500GB Ultra Slim HD:

http://http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22688&Itemid=47

Also, demand for HDD goes down in Europe as consumers turn to the cloud:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/02/emea-hard-drive-market-shrinks

 

[Giuly]

The last one rather reads as the editors are like "what the hell is an SSD?".

 

[Acorn]

that must be how this product was spawned. its western digital passport thinner brother. cleverly named My passport Air.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1040

it says supports up to 1 terabyte but they only sell the 500 gb version right now.

 

[Giuly]

It was called "MyPassport Edge" the last time I saw it, yet those housed 7mm hard drives.

 

[Acorn]

It was called "MyPassport Edge" the last time I saw it, yet those housed 7mm hard drives.

passport and passport edge are 2 different products on the western digital site.

 

[Giuly]

I mean the MyPassport Air, that one used to be called MyPassport Edge (supposedly because of the connector). And it had a 7mm hard drive inside, not this new, even smaller 5mm.

But what's completely missing here is the 9.5mm standard 2.5" WD Black SSHD hybrid-drive with 24GB of NAND flash on board, but from the informations I found about it, unlike the Momentus XT, you need special drivers for it to work and it's unclear whether those will be available for the Mac. I guess AnandTech will have further informations on it soon, as it's shipping to retailers already.

 

[sammich]

This is a stupid suggestion, but if you could get an SATA - 2x mini-SATA adaptor and it fit into your bay, maybe into an Optibay, you could stack them on top of each other and RAID them together.

MBPs have room for a 12mm drive height. So custom bay solution with a separator and stacking solution should work it.

 

[justperry]

This is a stupid suggestion, but if you could get an SATA - 2x mini-SATA adaptor and it fit into your bay, maybe into an Optibay, you could stack them on top of each other and RAID them together.

MBPs have room for a 12mm drive height. So custom bay solution with a separator and stacking solution should work it.

AFAIK you can't have 2 Data carriers on 1 SATA channel.

 

[Giuly]

Given that mSATA SSDs are capable of saturating SATA 6GBit/s and use an internal RAIN, it looks like it's a better idea to just get an mSATA SSD that doubles the capacity by doubling the amount of NAND chips. And yes, you can put them into 2.5" adapters, which fit OWC's DataDoubler for the Optibay. But so do regular 2.5" SSDs.