Seagate's 7mm Momentus Thin 2.5-inch hard disk for slim, high-capacity laptops: a world's first
By Thomas Ricker 
posted December 8th 2009 6:23AM
posted December 8th 2009 6:23AM
Any advancement in commercial storage is big news 'round here so we're stoked to learn of a new ultra-thin hard disk from Seagate meant to slake our jones for super-slim portable computing. Seems that Seagate's already sampling a 7-mm high disk as part of its Momentus Thin series of drives scheduled to be launched at CES in January. Impressive, especially when you consider that just about every 2.5-inch SATA disk we cover measures in at 9.5-mm high. Although Seagate doesn't give specifics, we assume the drive will be spinning a single platter. And knowing that dual-platter 2.5-inch disks currently max out at 640GB (or 320GB per platter), we expect Seagate to at least match that single-platter capacity, but probably improve upon it via a boost in areal density. Feel free to offer your guess in comments until all is revealed on January 5th.
I'm still traumatized by the 7200.11 1.5tb drives and 2 additional failed externals.... I'm gonna sit this out and wait for it to be thoroughly tested by early adopters.
@Eternity
The 7200.11 1.5TB drives are fine. I own 4 of them. One is constantly being written/read (torrents) and has never failed on me.
@Ned Scott
Its the luck of the draw with those drives. Go on Newegg and read the reviews. I have had 2 replacements die on me already and I refuse to take a chance on seagate with my data again. Not to mention 2 external drives that both had their USB ports pop out. I had to resort to cracking the things open and taking out the HD's so I can restore my data, thus voiding my warranties.
Playstation3 Really Slim anyone?
@TC Yes, its definitely the HDD thats holding the size back.
nice! this will save battery as well.
STX is only offering 250GB/platter on laptop HDD & slimming down the drive to single platter is not something new, but it's not cost effective if not many laptops were built with them... well, they've given up 1.8", perhaps they shouldn't've or they could be among those that offer a slim 8mm 1.8" with 320GB capacity. if they've evolved a higher capacity than the industry, they'd not only make it on a 7mm form factor but all product platforms, which make more sense.
@xy
1,8" is just too slow for anything but a pmp. imho.
Oi, the first drive maker to make a 1tb 9mm drive has my money. As far as I know the only one available is 12.5mm. It LOOKS like it would fit in my Studio 15, but I cant be sure until I buy it.
@Nitesh 9.5mm for Dell Studio 15.
@Nitesh
yep. ill also get a 1tb one, if these suckers come out at last
This was expected. SSD standard is 7mm and the only thing higher-end notebooks from going thinner is the current inclusion of the 9.5mm optical drive. Once that is gone—and it will start going away en massee in 2010 or 2011—then we can go to thinner cases which can use 7mm HDDs.
Of course, you don’t really get any more performance with the optical drive gone. The thinner case will require components to be spread and the cooling HW to take up more area. Same goes for the battery just to have the sam mAh.
This trend will have its pros and cons, but it will be where things will move to. This will just be a cheaper solution to 2.5” SSDs for these thin notebooks. Nothing more, nothing less, though we should see 400GB+ single-platter 2.5” HDDs in 2010.
@Bender Bending Rodriguez
There are 7mm ODD
Like the one on ThinkPad X301
@(Unverified) Thanks for the info. I apparently missed that release. I still say that optical drives will start to be obsolesced as internal drives from notebooks in 2010-11, but it’s good to see they can make a 7mm optical drive. The 13” and 15” HP Envys are sans optical drives and they are a beautiful thing.
@Bender Bending Rodriguez Agreed that optical is going away. The only reason I have one in my Thinkpad is so I can put another hard drive in that bay. The thin 'n light I'm typing this on (Acer Aspire AS1810tz) has no optical drive at all. Don't miss it. Most of the software is installed by download these days anyway. I have a USB powered ODD for when I need it, but it doesn't get taken out of the drawer very often.
im confused, is the entire drive thinner or the platter?
@acme64 the drive.
@acme64 The drive is thinner because it has half the platters as a 9.5mm drive
It would be great to see these on netbooks since they don't have DVD drives. I want a netbook but I also don't want to carry an external HDD for all my music, my software ripped from CDs/DVDs, and videos that I buy off iTunes. It would be awesome to see that, but who knows if that will happen
Engadget is wrong about what to expect for the capacity of these drives.
Recall that nearly all drives have a read head on both sides of the platter. I'm guessing that removing the second read got Seagate the extra 2.5mm they shaved off these things. So Seagate's slimmer drives will probably max out at 160GB or so with current maximum platter densities.
7mm thick, 2.5 inches long, with Momentum.
Wow, really? Really? Why are companies actually still developing new platter technologies? All the money wasted on improving these could and SHOULD be being spent to further SSD technologies. Platters are stable, the technology is already well-advanced, and we can always fall back on them. SSDs however are a newborn technology in comparison to the some twenty years platters have been in existence. These companies need to get their heads out of their butts and onto their shoulders. Don't they realize that the first one to cheaply market good SSDs will be more successful than the first to cheaply market 15,000 RPM Platter-drives? This makes me so mad
@Redon Gor
you are quite short sighted. do you really want to store your media on ssd? go ahead. but i put my movies, pictures, movies and also games on a hdd for a tenth of the cost per gb.
for the system and programs, sure, ssd is the way to go.
@(Unverified)
No, I'm not saying that at all. I have a 500gig platter in my tower, as well as a 500gig platter external. What I'm saying is that I really wish the companies would start investing all of their money into developing and furthering SSD technology so that I can sooner put all that stuff onto an SSD. I know that for now at least platters are the way to go. But if the big companies spent their money researching SSDs instead of platters, SSDs would soon easily overtake any and all platters. Even in RAID, platters wouldn't be able to compete with an SSD. This situation is analogous to how the American auto industry killed the electric car. They started getting popular, and people started to buy them instead of gasoline-powered vehicles. GM and their cohorts in the industry couldn't see past the crap in their colons to understand that electric cars were and ARE how things are going to be. Quite literally, gasoline-powered cars are only still in development because of the ridiculous selfishness of the big-name auto companies.
@Redon Gor
Then you are myopic to think that companies have to stop all R&D in one area and go full on all eggs in one basket simply because a newer technology will eventually surpass it.
The fact is that they invest in many technologies. Seagate also announced enterprise-grade SSDs this day. And a 160GB single platter 1.8” HDD was just announced by Toshiba a few months ago along with the new iPod Classic, up from 120GB. We’ll see the 1.8” HDDs fade away, like the 1” HDDs did, before we see the 2.5” and 3.5” HDDs die off.
They are fast enough and reliable enough to make the lower cost per GB well worth it for most uses at this point.
click click click............PAUSE
click click click............PAUSE
don't do it! run away as fast as you can!!!
I'm still waiting for a firmware fix to my seagate st9500420ASG. Grrrr, how dare they. Grrrr.
After the initial technological breakthrough almost everything is about miniaturization these days. Couple a small storage device with low power requirements to a portable media center (mini projector or battery powered glasses) and you have a portable cinema in your pocket. Just as the mp3 player has revolutionized the DJ business, so too will video one day revolutionize private gatherings.
I remember when a 40 megabyte hard drive was considered extravagant and weighed more than the computer; C=64's were very light-weight.