Even though the price of solid state drives is coming down, it is still much more affordable to buy regular hard drives instead. We’re also finding that more and more people are demanding more and more storage in their portable devices. And we want said devices to be as thin as possible.

Aiding in this effort is a recently announced hard drive from Toshiba. The Travelstar Z7K320 measures just 7mm in thickness, but it is able to maintain the full “desktop” spinning speed of 7200rpm. The 2.5-inch drive also supports the Serial ATA (SATA) 3Gbps transfer speed standard, meaning you don’t have to sacrifice anything in terms of performance.

It is available in up to 320GB in capacity and features a 16MB cache. Given its smaller size, the Hitachi drive offers a low power consumption rating of just 1.8 watts during operation and 0.8 watts when idle. For even lower power consumption, you can consider the similar Travelstar Z5K320. It spins at just 5400rpm, but consumes just 1.6 watts when active and 0.55 watts when idle. Its cache is a memory little smaller too at 8MB.

The Hitachi super-thin hard drive has just been announced, so it may be some time before it hits retail channels or appears in consumer-ready devices from various manufacturers.