In WD, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., has announced it is sampling a 5mm-thin hard disk drive featuring hybrid technology.
The company has developed hard drives slim enough for integration into todays thinnest notebook PCs, which provide high-capacity storage and robustness while featuring instant-on and application performance similar to todays client solid state drives (SSDs).
Mobile devices are becoming smaller, thinner, lighter and more responsive, said Matt Rutledge, vice president of client storage solutions at WD. Working with our technology partners, WD has developed new 5 mm hard drives that enable high capacity storage along with excellent performance and superior economics to allow our customers to expand their thin offerings.
WDs innovative hybrid technology pairs MLC NAND flash storage for fast SSD-like data throughput and instant-on responsiveness with magnetic disks for efficient, high-capacity storage.
Similar to the practice of multi-million dollar enterprise systems, WDs hybrid technology utilizes the concept of tiered storage. Data accessed most frequently (often referred to as hot data) is managed using speedy NAND flash to ensure fast response times, while data accessed less often (cold data) resides on the robust magnetic disks.
The tiered design of hybrid hard drives, compared to current dual-drive solutions, also provides a redundancy benefit for users. The magnetic disk backs up all files residing in the NAND, protecting the user from inevitable NAND wear and preserving it for the more hot data handling. WDs hybrid technology works in conjunction with the PC operating system to deliver higher performance than current hybrid offerings while minimizing NAND wear to allow the use of less expensive MLC NAND.
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