IDF 2012: Western Digital 5mm Hybrid Drives Seen

During the IDF 2012 Technology Showcase we got a chance to see the new Western Digital hybrid hard drives in person!

On display at the WD booth was a WD Black 500GB drive (Model Number WD5000MPVK) that uses a single 500GB platter spinning disk with a 32MB SLC NAND Flash in a form factor that was just 5mm thick! WD developed this hard drive for integration into todays thinnest notebook PCs and thanks to the hybrid technology it should be able to have instant-on abilities and fast load times.

In the image above you can see the new 5mm drive on the left sitting next to a 7mm z-height drive. If yuo look closely you can notice that there is barely enough room for a standard sized screw hole! Western Digital will offer a 1TB hybrid drive, but it will be in the 7mm z-height.

Flipping the WD Hybrid drive over it looks identical to any other hard drive, but we did notice that Western Digital was using a new SATA power and data combo plug that we have never seen before.

The new connector is called SFF-8038 and will help this thin hard drive fit into small mobile devices where thin connectors are a must. AS you can see Western Digital is clearly positioning this drive to the Small Form Factor (SFF) market and it will likely be more of an OEM part than a retail consumer part in the near future.