A hard drive hybrid 7 mm?

On one of the blogs of Seagate, one of the leaders of the firm wondered on the interest of a hybrid in the ultrabooks hard disk, the "concept" of portable PC launched by Intel recently put in place by many manufacturers like Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc.

What is interesting, out side marketing, it's that he wondered about the possible creation of a Momentus XT with a thickness of 7 mm, while the classical model is in a more standard format, 9.5 mm. Currently, the ultrabooks use either an SSD-based solution or a solution composed of a hard disk of 7 mm coupled to a small capacity SSD used cache (SSD Caching of Intel). In the first case, it is limited to the level of capacity: SSDS are expensive and the ultrabooks must not - ideally - exceed $1,000, so a 128 GB SSD is usually the limit. In the second case, the space needed is more important than with a hybrid solution such as Seagate.

Still two problems: first, the passage in 7 mm implies a limitation to the level of capacity. Indeed, 7 mm (used by Archos) hard disks are limited to a single shelf and therefore the best 500 GB currently. Then, the problem of the SSD cache, whether in the hybrid hard disk drives or with the Intel solution, is that it remains a cache: If you out of the preset scenario (and therefore the cache), performance crash and found the same level as a conventional hard drive. With the Momentus XT, Seagate partially solves the problem by using a hard drive at 7,200 rpm, but this is not necessarily possible with a hard disk of 7 mm.

In the end, Seagate should propose a Momentus XT (or equivalent in 5,400 rpm) 7 mm thick which will make pleasure lambda users - who prefer 500 GB of storage space to 128 GB - but is not necessarily something that will bring its letters of nobility to the Ultrabooks. The MacBook Air from Apple, which is clearly the Intel model for the ultrabooks, uses only with SSD and it is clearly one of its big advantages.