Seagate to start shipping its thinnest hard drive yet

Seagate is gearing up to ship its thinnest hard drive yet, measuring in at 5mm thin.

The Laptop Ultrathin HDD is designed to be integrated into ultra-thin, lightweight mobile computing devices and tablets while promising high-capacity storage at an affordable price.

Seagate is aiming to frame the Laptop Ultrathin HDD as an affordable alternative to solid state drives by also touting the potential for longer battery life and support for more attachable storage solutions.

The drive is designed to take up 25 percent less space than its previous generation 7mm counterpart.

To think of it another way, Seagate described the 3.3-ounce HDD as thin as "four stacked credit cards and lighter than a deck of cards."

With 500GB of storage on tap, the new Seagate hard drive should be able to hold approximately 100,000 photos, 125,000 songs or 62 hours of high-definition video. For more sensitive and business-related use cases, SED encryption is available.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company is hoping to keep its OEM partners happy by still offering an industry standard SATA connector and a 6GB/s SATA interface for fast data transfer rates-- not to mention a price tag of $89 per unit.

Two of those OEM partners already lined up are Dell and Lenovo -- the latter of which is crucial as the Chinese PC maker continues to dominate the (albeit flailing) global PC market.

Images via Seagate