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back to article Toshiba notebook disk drive slims down. You like that, gamers?

Toshiba has thinned is L200 500GB internal drive, shaving off 26 per cent of its thickness, so it takes up less space in notebooks and gaming consoles. The L200 Slim, with its 7mm z-height, has the same 500GB capacity as the thicker L200 with its 9.5mm z-height. It also sports the same 92g weight, but it only has an 8MB buffer …

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  1. Jon Massey
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    I fail to see the point

    Unless you're monumentally cheap, I don't know why anyone wouldn't stump up the extra £64 to get, for example, a 480GB Crucial BX200 SSD. No spinny bits to get damaged and significantly better performance. The days of the mobile HDD are done.

    Even then, 500GB is a joke, WD has a 1TB 7mm Blue drive and Seagate has a 2TB two-platter drive that's still only 7mm.

    9 1 Reply
    1. Mikey
      Reply Icon

      Re: I fail to see the point

      Other than being over twice the price for less space, the SSD does have one issue that your standard spinning rust doesn't have. Namely, if the electronics fail on the HDD, the platters are still readable and recoverable, even down to the point of doing a simple board swap rather than sending it to recovery experts. The SSD however, if the controller on that goes bang... you have a lot of NAND chips sitting there with bits and bytes on them that are rather useless without the associated controller to know where everything is, thus necessitating a rather expensive trip to said experts. And given I've heard more SSDs going wonky recently than standard traditional drives, that could very well be a deal breaker for some people.

      Of course, this drive would make an excellent mirror for your expensive SSD, wouldn't it? And for less than half the price too! Bargain!

      6 2 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        POP! Goes the Hard Drive!!

        Having had a 3 week old SSD go pop mid session, I have to agree.

        On another note, will this drive still be labelled "Hitachi" in the firmware??

        My PCs are full of Hitachi/Toshiba drives, especially after a run of Seagate drive failures this year; a 240GB Patriot SSD for each PC's OS and program folder, but all the data goes onto the spinning rust.

        0 0 Reply
        1. Updraft102
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          Re: POP! Goes the Hard Drive!!

          Toshiba has manufactured 2.5" hard drives for some time. Their 3.5" drive business was a recent acquisition from WD. This is probably an all-Toshiba design. Not sure if that is a good thing; I've seen some reports of poor reliability from Toshiba 2.5" drives.

          I've got a couple of Hitachi-derived Toshiba hard drives myself. Don't know if they are as good as the HGST-branded ones, but I think it was a good bet. I've got backups in case of failure (which you should always have if you care about your data, regardless of drive type). And FWIW, they self-report as Toshiba drives, not Hitachi; they did change the string eventually.

          0 0 Reply
      2. Z80
        Reply Icon

        Re: I fail to see the point

        > ... thus necessitating a rather expensive trip to said experts

        Or a much cheaper trip to where you keep your backups

        2 0 Reply
      3. Fitz_
        Reply Icon

        Re: I fail to see the point

        " if the controller on that goes bang... you have a lot of NAND chips sitting there with bits and bytes on them that are rather useless without the associated controller to know where everything is, thus necessitating a rather expensive trip to said experts"

        If only there was some way we could keep some form of 'copy' of our data to protect against such a situation. You would think someone would have come up with something by now.

        1 0 Reply
        1. d3vy
          Reply Icon

          Re: I fail to see the point

          123reg have a cloud backup solution....

          0 0 Reply
  2. Sebastian A

    Which laptop manufacturer is going to say "Sure, we'll save a few cubic cm by using this drive and making sure we can never fit one from another manufacturer. Sounds like a great idea!"?

    Actually, that's exactly what'll happen and the poor bastard who has to repair it out of warranty will have to phone the owner and say that instead of a cheapie replacement they have to stump up for one that's half the capacity and twice the price.

    Bitter, me? Nah.

    2 1 Reply
    1. chris 17 Silver badge
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      @Sebastian A

      is it actually worth repairing a cheap sub £350 laptop?

      how much would you charge for a new spinny disk, os install and restore of anything you can recover?

      would anyone pay what ever your charges are?

      0 0 Reply
  3. Spacedinvader
    WTF?

    So....it's thinner so you need some rubber caddy or what to fit it in normal hd space?

    1 0 Reply
    1. frank ly
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      Some retail pack SSD's come with a stick on plastic spacer so they can have a snug fit in 2.5" laptop bays.

      0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seagate have done 5mm drives (ST500LT032) with the same capacity and twice that cache since 2014

    For some reason Dell were shipping them as a cheap option in the Latitude E7440 'ultrabook' - in a 7mm bay with rubber spacers - slow as hell but scary thin

    0 0 Reply

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