WD Blue UltraSlim hard drive is just 5mm thin

Western Digital just introduced their latest mobile hard drive engineering feat, the WD Blue UltraSlim which is the world’s first 5mm, 2.5-inch hard drive.

The WD Blue UltraSlim is 47 percent thinner and 36 percent lighter than a standard mobile hard drive. It is designed with stronger aluminum materials and a harder Tied-Shaft motor which increases device pinch strength by as much as 30 percent.

Western Digital introduced a couple new drive technologies on their UltraSlim drives. There’s the StableTrac where the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations which enables consistently higher performance. Dual Stage Actuators, on the other hand, improve positional accuracy over the data track(s).

Despite the SSD-size, the WD Blue UltraSlim still uses platter technology so you won’t actually get the performance benefits of SSD drives. This development, however, enables for thinner and lighter notebooks in the future that are more budget-friendly.

Currently, the WD Blue UltraSlim is only available in 500GB capacity. RPM tops at 5400 just like other 2.5-inch drives and it uses a SATA 6 Gb/s interface.

Also new is the WD Black SSHD which is a 5mm solid state hybrid drive which are currently shipping to OEMs.