WD ships first 5mm hard drive and SSHD

From CNET News.com: WD announced today the availability its first solid-state hybrid drive, the WD Black SSHD.

SSHD is the new name for hybrid drives that combine both solid-state storage (used in solid-state drives) and regular platter-based storage (used in regular hard drives) in a single standard box.

The WD Black is not the first SSHD on the market, but it's very different from the Laptop Thin SSHD that Seagate released just last month.

For one, the WD Black SSD is ultra-slim, just 5mm thick (compared with 7mm of the Seagate drives), making it almost half the thickness and some 36 percent lighter compared to a standard 9.5mm 2.5-in hard drive. Secondly, it comes with up to 24GB of NAND flash memory (compared to just 8GB of the Seagate drive). And finally, the new drive is the first that supports the new SFF-8784 edge card connector, the type of connector used in internal storage devices for smartphones and tablets.

In addition to the WD Black SSHD, WD also announced the availability of the WD Blue drive, that shares the same physical design as the SSHD but is just a regular hard drive with no flash memory.

Both drives support SATA 3 (6Gbps), retain the 2.5-inch dimension standard, and offers 500GB of storage space. Seagate says the two new drives are designed mostly for OEMs, especially those that make tablets and ultra-portable devices, but can also be used with standard desktops and some laptops, when coupled with its new data cable. This data cable draws juice from the host to power the drive, eliminating the need for a separate power connection like in existing standard drives.

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