Pantelis Alexopoulos's Push for Slimmer Disk Drives

Pantelis Alexopoulos understands he isn’t in the sexiest part of the tech business. The 64-year-old engineer from Greece has spent his career designing hard disk drives—storage devices that are crucial to computing, but don’t attract lines of sleep-deprived fans at five in the morning. “The world does not respect drives,” says Alexopoulos, a Cornell University-trained veteran of IBM, HGST, and TDK Fujitsu who has been executive director of Singapore’s Data Storage Institute since 2010. “The customer doesn’t know it’s a marvel of engineering.” A drive, he says, “is more sophisticated than a Boeing 747.”

Suddenly, though, people like Alexopoulos are looking, if not sexy, at least datable. Standard drives for most laptops are 9.5 mm thick, far too bulky for tablets and the new breed of thin, light laptops known as ultrabooks. Companies have tried to cope by using more expensive components or selling machines without much storage capacity. For instance, Apple gets around the problem for the MacBook Air by using flash-memory-based solid state drives, which are made from silicon and have no moving mechanical parts. SSDs work for a niche, high-end product like the Air but are too expensive for machines targeting the mass market. PC makers producing ultrabooks are using 7.5 mm disk drives—slimmer than 9.5 mm but not as slim as they would like.