Western Digital is seeing increased interest in hybrid hard drives and it hopes to introduce its hybrid drive lineup by the second half of next year.

WD President Stephen Milligan claims all major OEMs have already shown “strong interest” in WD’s 5mm and 7mm designs, unveiled last month.

WD’s hybrid drives differ from the competition in that they use multi-level NAND memory and utilize tiered storage, which helps manage NAND storage and focuses on frequently accessed data, while at the same time reducing NAND wear, allowing WD to use cheaper MLC NAND. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

At just 5mm, the new drives are bound to end up in quite a few ultrathin notebooks next year. Although SSDs are catching up in terms of price, they still have a very long way to go and hybrid drives seem like the perfect stopgap measure.