Gadgetory

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 NCIX calm 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 home page they've got a link to all their videos 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 in light two and a half inch 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 I foods 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 nine and a half millimeter 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 millimeter drives came into play so we were able to get reasonable capacities into these form factors the problem with seven millimeter 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 WT completely re-engineered the two and a half millimeter drive to make it more shock resistant I don't know if you guys saw that fall but it is still as shock resistant as one of the larger drives and they are able to achieve new capacities in seven millimeter as well as a completely new form factor which is the five millimeter drive so this right here is a 110 bite device in a 7 mil form factor and this guy right here is a 500 gig drive in a five millimeter 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 WT went ok 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 five mill and the slim which is the seven 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 HTC One 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 mind-blowing so these tablets right here are actually showing a number of drop tests that were done by WDS engineering team where they basically go ok 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 that 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 playback media files uninterruptedly heads are parked on these hybrid drive 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 gigabyte ultra-slim or a one terabyte slim but not only do they have all the drive components on here they've actually put an end flash as well anywhere from 8 gigs to 16 gigs to 24 gigs is available on these hybrid drive 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 when I can't lift up but hopefully you get the point now behind me here i have three glass showcases this one was impressive in sort of you know yeah WD that's pretty 2012 there what you got going on so this is a one terabyte nine and a half millimeter 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 it 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 ultra slim so that's a seven mil you're looking at before right there and this is the five millimeter so I'd like my lovely assistant to come in here and show me how slim a five millimeter drive is this is an HTC One 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 to you got to give them some credit right so there you go guys this is our day to coverage of the WD booth focusing on their ultra slim and slim drives available in 500 gig and one terabyte capacities don't miss any of our computex show coverage and don't miss any of our WD videos for a chance to win awesome prizes after the show