Linus Tech tips coverage of computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our
trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance and our trusted retail partner
is nc.com guys we're here at the WD booth
at computex 2013 it's day two this is our home base and there's a bit of a
team meeting going on here some photo opportunities I just want to remind you
guys we've got a ton of giveaways that we're doing in collaboration with WD you
can check out the WD homepage they've got a link to all their videos or or you
can click the link in the video description to the Linus Tech tips Forum
where there's full details we're giving away internal drives external drives
full-blown gaming systems but we're not going to be talking about gaming systems
in this particular video we're going to be focused on the slim thin and Light 2
and2 in WD drives that are available in some pretty new and interesting
configurations let's go have a look now these are the drives I alluded to before
where we're pushing the envelope in terms of the storage available in these
slim form factors now for a long time we've had very thin devices I mean iPads
and iPods and IPS and whatever else there happens to be but the problem is
that they all rely on flash which is fast and it's shock resistant but what
it isn't is High Capacity now this is a traditional 9 and 1 half MIM Drive can I
get my lovely assistant to hold up a slim notebook for me here that clearly
with all the other things that need to be inside such as the keyboard and
touchpad and PCB and all that stuff that clearly wasn't going to fit so that is
where slim 7 mm drives came into play so
we were able to get reasonable capacities into these form factors the
problem with 7mm drives was they still weren't that high capacity and the fact
that well they still weren't really thin enough for some of the devices people
wanted so WD completely re-engineered the 2 and a half mm drive to make it
more shock resistant I don't know if you guys saw that fall but uh it is still as
shock resistant as one of the larger drives and they are able to achieve new
capacities in 7 mm as well as a
completely new form factor which is the 5mm drive so this right here is a 1 tbte
device in a 7 mil form factor and this guy right here is a 500 gig Drive in a 5
mm slim form factor so how do you do that the question might be well number
one is instead of using a metal top they're actually sealing the top with a
plastic coating number two is changing to a micro PCB you know how I mentioned
that the drive won't fit in the notebook because of all the electronic components
that are all over the bottom of it well WD went okay well the bottoms of our
drives are covered in these things so I guess let's just cover less of the
bottom of the drive in it and then we'll have more room for platters so the main
difference between the ultra slim which is the 5 mil and the slim which is the 7
mil is that this one has one platter inside for 500 gigs of storage and the
other one has two platters inside for one terabyte of storage now robustness
is so important for these form factors I mean check out this tablet right here go
ahead and lift this up for me I'm going to do my trademark phone thickness
comparison here so you are actually talking about a device that has a hard
drive inside it that is not much thicker
than a smartphone this is an HTC1 so it's not exactly a brick by any stretch
of the imagination but what does that mean for the ruggedness and the
robustness of the drive itself this new
design actually increases the resistance
to damage whether it is from touching the top of it which makes no sense to
the Layman like me because I look at this thing and I go holy crap I can
actually see the outline of the components inside it doesn't even have a
metal cover but it actually improves the
ruggedness of the drive compared to a metal cover which is just mindblowing so
the this these tablets right here are actually showing a number of drop tests
that were done by wd's engineering team where they basically go okay let's uh
let's drop it let's play catch with it let's do all these stuff and what
happens is the heads actually Park and
you can even they they they actually want us to do a demo maybe one of the
other days we'll see we'll see if we can get a tablet that we can drop but you
can actually play back media files uninterrupted while the heads are parked
on these hybrid drives so this right here we didn't talk about this yet these
are the black drives so they are sshds or hybrid drives that implement this new
technology so we can have up to a 500 GB
ultra slim or a 1 tbte slim but not only
do they have all the drive components on here they've actually put n flash as
well anywhere from 8 gigs to 16 gigs to 24 gigs is available on these hybrid
drives so right now you're going to see these in OEM devices only but it's
extremely exciting to see some of the stuff that we have on demo here actually
that one I can't lift up but hopefully you get the point now behind me here I have three
glass showcases this one was impressive and sort of a you know yeah WD that's
pretty uh 2012 there what you got going
on so this is a 1 TB 9 1 12 mm drive
this uses the the old design so they got the big metal cover single stage
actuator you got a couple platters in there and then check that out that
honking huge PCB I mean how did they get away with that kind of inefficiency
before I'm just I'm just I'm just messing with these guys but the reality
of it is these new drives for 2013 have been completely re-engineered so you see
that plastic coating on the top underneath that is an extremely thin
piece of what they're calling a micro metal it's so slim and thin that it
still protects the drive and in fact gives it that ruggedness but doesn't
take up extra space next we've got a dual stage actuator which improves the
accuracy of the drive the ability of it to read from the platters we've still
got two platters inside the drive and then moving down this is where a lot of
the Innovation actually happened that PCB design you saw before with all the
extra stuff they got rid of everything miniaturized everything and they were
able to get the PCB completely out of the way of the spinning platters
themselves reducing the thickness again now this guy right here uses the same
technology this is the Ultras slim so that's a 7 mil you're looking at before
right there and this is the 5mm so I'd like my lovely assistant to come in here
and show me how slim a 5mm Drive is this
is an HTC1 so you can pretty much store 500 gigs of storage in this or you can
store like you know your contacts and
your cell phone and I mean these are impressive too you got to give them some credit right so there you go guys this
is our day two coverage of the WD Booth focusing on their ultra slim and slim
drives available on 500 gig and one terabyte capacities don't miss any of
our computech show coverage and don't miss any of our WD videos for a chance
to win awesome prizes after the show