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Seagate phasing out 7200rpm mobile hard drives

Company is going hybrid for laptop hard drives. Gone are the days of the pure magnetic hard disk drive with high rpm.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers
Seagate is focusing on hybrid drives that combine a standard 5400rpm magnetic hard disk with a solid-state drive cache.
Seagate is focusing on hybrid drives that combine a standard 5400rpm magnetic hard disk with a solid-state drive cache. Seagate

Laptop hard drive speeds aren't tied strictly to revolutions per minute anymore, according to Seagate.

Seagate is abandoning 2.5-inch 7200rpm magnetic mobile hard drives for hybrids that have slower-rated RPMs but integrate large solid-state drive (SSD) caches, the company said today in a statement provided to CNET.

"Seagate's innovation in the area of Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) technology provides a much faster overall performance platform than 7200 RPM based hard drives," the company said.

Bottom line: Seagate is saying a 5400rpm hard drive with a large SSD is faster than a pure 7200rpm magnetic drive.

Hard disk drive (HDD) and SSD hybrid configurations are showing up in lots of ultrabooks. PC makers like HP, Acer and Dell, typically integrate Intel mSATA SSD caches with standard spinning 5400rpm HDDs.

With this strategy, the company hopes to better meet cost-performance goals. Seagate-authorized distributors have been notified of these changes, and the company expects the last 7200rpm products to ship midsummer.

[Via X-bit Labs ]