Western Digital this week introduced a series of 6TB external hard drives based on 2.5-inch HDDs, which highlights the first new capacity point for this hard disk drive form factor in about seven years. There is a catch, though: the HDD is slow and will unlikely fit into any mobile PCs, so it looks like it will exclusively serve portable and specialized storage products.
Western Digital's 6TB 2.5-inch HDD is currently used for the latest versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external storage devices and is not available separately. All of these drives (excluding the already very thick G-Drive ArmorATD) are thicker than their 5 TB predecessors, which may suggest that in a bid to increase the HDD's capacity, the manufacturer simply installed another platter and made the whole drive thicker instead of developing new platters with a higher areal density.
