Although there may be much larger hard drives out there than two terabytes at this point, nobody had managed to get anything close to that into a 2.5 inch, 7mm tall drive, until now. Seagate has announced that it’s done just that, creating the world’s smallest high-capacity drive to date.
While Seagate has managed to make 2.5 inch drives that are 9mm tall before, this is the first time it’s gotten such a large capacity plater into just 7mm of space, making this an incredibly slim piece of kit for such a huge storage space.
“Combining new mechanical firmware architectures, with state of the art heads, media and electronic design, this technology is a real game changer — providing [over] four times more capacity than a 0.25TB SSD at a substantially lower cost,” Seagate said in its release.
Related: Seagate targets small and medium-sized businesses with three new 8TB HDD options
Indeed, even though solid state drives do offer much improved performance over traditional hard drives and their price has come down, they don’t offer the same sort of capacity as hard drives yet and they still aren’t as affordable, especially at larger storage sizes.
However Seagate has said it may address this in the future by exploring whether it’s possible to keep a similar form factor and size, whilst incorporating a small SSD to provide the same performance as a dedicated solid state drive and the same large storage for less-frequently accessed files.
This new miniature drive — that at 0.2lbs is 25 percent lighter than the previous generation as well — will allow Seagate to offer hardware makers the chance to build even thinner and lighter laptops and tablets that can still offer large capacities to owners.
While no release date or price has been announced, previous 2TB, 2.5 inch drives from Seagate have cost around $120, so unless the technology used to make this drive that bit smaller is dreadfully expensive, expect a similar price tag.
