When it comes to HDDs you can usually have a really thin drive or you can have a high-capacity drive, but not both. Hitachi has unveiled a new HDD that gives mobile devices the best of both worlds with a thin design that also packs in a lot of storage space. The new HDD is the Travelstar Z5K5000 and it is the thinnest 2.5-inch 500GB HDD in the world.

The HDD packs 500GB onto a single platter allowing the thickness of the drive to be only 7mm. That means that the thin profile device will work in devices that are really thin and typically rely on more expensive and lower capacity SSDs for storage. The drive spins at 5400 rpm and is a direct replacement for 9.5mm thick drives in all sorts of notebooks and external storage devices.

Other than being thin, the drive is also very green needing only 1.8W when reading or writing and 0.55W during idle. The drive is also nearly silent with 1.9 bels at idle and 2.1 bels during seek. The drive uses Hitachi advanced format tech to allow for HDD sectors of 4K bytes rather than 512 bytes improving capacity and reducing errors. The drives are shipping this month at an undisclosed price.