The major hard drive manufacturers want their HDD for Ultrabook and therefore have initiated investigations to create form-compatible HDs only 5 mm thick, and features with this type of thin laptops. In this way we would have a real alternative to current SSD, keeping the same thickness of the equipment and lowering the final price of the equipment.

The ultralight design specifications Ultrabook, with lower power requirements and faster boot and application access, is making the SSD in the real storage standard on these machines and even companies like Intel are already working on new generations of SSDs for ultrabooks.

However, the giants in the production of hard drives (Western Digital and Seagate) also want to be protagonists in these premium laptops, developing a new hard disk dramatically reduce its size from the standard 12.5 mm and the 9, 5 and 7 millimeters thinner hard drives available.

The hard disks of 5 mm would continue reducing the thickness of these laptops and decrease their consumption, temperature and noise emissions compared to existing drives.

In addition, manufacturers maintain that is the main advantage of the hard disks off the SSD, a price per Gbyte still considerably cheaper than solid state drives. A new option for storage in ultrabooks would allow or even hybrid systems using two hard drives in RAID, an interesting variant to increase data security on professional models.

Still in the planning stages for its technical complexity, it is expected that these hard drives 5mm thick will hit the market in the near future.