Here's The Skinny: Seagate Debuts World's Thinnest Laptop Hard Drive

The new Momentus Thin drive is a mere 7mm high, which is considerably smaller than the typical 9.5mm height of more than 90 percent of the 2.5-inch hard drives currently being used in mobile PCs, Seagate said.

The drives are slated to come to market as mobile PCs are getting thinner, forcing PC manufacturers to look for thinner and lighter components including storage devices such as hard drives and SSDs.

The Dell Adamo XPS, for instance, which Dell has shown without discussing a release date, is only 10mm thick.

Other vendors are piling in to the ultrathin mobile PC market, which seems to be increasingly characterized by notebook PCs less than 25mm thick, which is just less than 1 inch.

Toshiba in September unveiled its Satellite T100 series of notebook PCs with Intel Pentium processors and DDR-3 memory. Others moving into this market include Asus and Acer.

Seagate's Momentus Thin drive is expected to be released in January to mobile PC OEM and integrator partners. It is slated to be available with capacity points of 250 GB and 160 GB, and include an 8-MB cache, a 3-Gbps SATA interface and a spin speed of 5,400 rpm.

Seagate had been planning to hold the news about the Momentus Thin drives until the CES show in January but released the news Monday after information about the drives was leaked.