Seagate introduces its thinnest portable hard drive ever: 9 mm thick

Seagate showed off its thinnest portable hard drive yet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today. It shows that the race for smaller, faster, better is never over when it comes to new tech products.

The Scotts Valley, Calif.-based storage company said its newest 2.5-inch diameter GoFlex external hard drive is a razor-thin 9 millimeters thick, about 38 percent slimmer than the company’s current ultra-portable drives. Although people are putting more and more critical data on their computers — from family videos to work documents — only about 15 percent back up their data. If this can help get more people to do backups because it’s more convenient, that’s great.

The new drive is aimed at entry-level laptops and netbooks. It represents the company’s best attempt to stay competitive with flash memory chips, which are used in SSD drives for laptops. This drive will be available this spring with a capacity of 320 gigabytes. It has a universal serial bus (USB) 3.0 interface to transfer data at speeds 10 times faster than USB 2.0. The small size will allow Seagate to sell cool-looking yet functional external hard drives for people who want to live a “mobile lifestyle.” Pricing isn’t available yet.

Seagate also announced a new line of GoFlex portable external drives for Mac computers. The drives cost $249 for 1.5 terabytes, $199 for 1 terabyte, $179 for 750 gigabytes and $149 for 500 gigabytes. Seagate also announced that it will certify third-party vendors to make slots on their products that can house removable hard drive cartridges from Seagate.