If you thought Western Digital's 7mm slim, 500GB Scorpio Blue was an achievement, then we can tell you it's only the start of what's to come. At IDF Beijing Intel was pushing for an even slimmer hard drive standard which will stand a mere 5mm tall, or as Intel put it, 28 percent smaller in terms of volume.Our colleagues over at VR-Zone Chinese snapped a picture of what Intel is hoping for during one of the many presentations. Despite SSD's being popular in Ultrabooks, for many people 128 or 256GB is simply not enough space and it's not always convenient to carry around an external hard drive with you. As such, the company is proposing a new hard drive standard with a new SATA interface in tow.
As you can see from the picture, the new SATA interface will be less than a quarter of the size of today's SATA interface and will be moved from a fairly central position on the drive, onto one of the corners. Coming up with new implementations of the SATA interface will take time though and Intel isn't expecting the SATA-IO to be ready until Q4 of this year at best when it comes to finalizing the standard.There are of course some drawbacks too, as a slimmer hard drive would mean further limitations to the mechanics and at 5mm it would be impossible to put more than a single platter in a 2.5-inch drive. However, Intel is expecting that we'll see 1TB 5mm drives in 15mm thin Ultrabooks by 2015 which sounds like a fairly realistic goal.Source: VR-Zone Chinese

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