Seagate hard drives specialist, offers external hard drives FreeAgent Go 750, 880 and 1 024 Go A pretty interesting news: Western Digital was until recently the only manufacturer to offer this type of capability. But while Western uses disks of 12.5 mm thick (as is the norm rather than 9.5 mm), Seagate is even worse: they measure 15 mm thick.

In the standard

Although this value seems high, it is in the standard: 2.5-inch format is actually several layers. The standard thickness is 9.5 mm and all laptops accept this thickness. The 12.5 mm, more rare and restricted to models with three trays, is mainly used in laptops and large (including models with a screen size of 17 inches and up) and - notable exception - in Apple MacBook Pro. Finally, 15 mm is mainly used in business, although some consumer models are available with this thickness (the Velociraptor, for example). Note also that some models do not exceed 7 mm, mainly in the world of SSD (Intel). In practice, this thickness is not unusual pose problems to people who buy an external hard drive to install the hard drive in a laptop, and they are rare.

Four plateaus?

In practice, one can imagine that this thickness unusual purpose: to provide a disk with four 250 GB platters Using three platters, Seagate 750 GB and reaches, using a seven-sided design with four trays ( and therefore eight sides), it is close to 880 GB, the value proposed by Seagate. Note that the company does not have the speed of rotation of the plates, instead of Western Digital says that although the 1 TB model (with three 333 GB platters) runs at 5 200 rpm instead of the usual 5400 RPM.