Seagate is launching a new series of hard drives, the Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDDs. These hard drives are barely 5 mm thick and weigh just 3.3 oz. Capacities will reach 500 GB. The drives will come in a 2.5" form factor.

"The new Seagate Laptop Ultrathin truly raises the bar, enabling us to finally create high-capacity, thin and light laptops that consumers crave at mass-market price points they can afford," said S.Y. Shian, corporate vice president and general manager of Asus' notebook business unit. "The drive's capacity, coupled with its ultra-slim, lightweight footprint, empowers our engineers to think out of the box and create truly ground-breaking, innovative system designs- it's a win- win for both us and the consumer."

The drives will spin at 5400 RPM, carry 16 MB of cache, have a 5.6 ms average latency, and have sustained data transfer rates of up to 100 MB/s. The drives' power consumption will be no more than 1.4 W.

Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin 500 GB hard drive will cost an MSRP of $89. Numerous manufacturers, among which are Dell and Lenovo, should start employing the units soon.