Fresh off the news that it is phasing out production of 7200rpm mobile hard disk drives (HDDs), Seagate on Wednesday announced that it is set to start shipping third-generation solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs) which combine NAND flash memory with mechanical disk drive capacity.

Seagate’s trio of new SSHDs include a 500GB drive measuring just 7 millimeters in height for ultra-thin laptops like ultrabooks, a 1 terabyte drive for high-end, full-sized laptops, and a desktop PC drive offering up to 2TB capacity and 8GB of NAND flash memory (pictured from left to right).

“Seagate’s engineers have really outdone themselves this time. Our new SSHDs serve up your favorite content with the lightning-fast performance you have to experience to believe,” Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing, said in a statement(Opens in a new window). “With these new drives it’s like adding a turbo-charge to your PC, without having to sacrifice capacity, at a price that’s easy on your wallet.”

Seagate said its new Laptop and Laptop Thin SSHDs offer a 40 percent storage performance boost over previous generation hybrid drives, while adding “as much as 30 percent to total system performance, regardless of the processor inside the system.” The storage giant said its third-generation hybrid drive technology offers boot times in laptops that are under 10 seconds and performs storage functions on Windows 8 machines “five times faster than a standard 5400rpm notebook hard drive.”

While Seagate didn’t specify price points for its new drives, the company said [t]hese products … enable system builders to build high-performance, high-capacity systems, including new thin and light laptops, at mass-market price points.”

Seagate’s new Desktop SSHD, meanwhile, utilizes the company’s Adaptive Memory technology “to identify and store only the most critical data a system needs to go fast,” resulting in faster boot times and up to four times the performance speed of PCs utilizing HDD solutions, according to the company. The Desktop SSHD will carry a price tag that’s “just slightly more than a standard hard drive” with equivalent capacity, Seagate said.

Where can we expect to see these hybrid drives? Seagate’s press release contained testimonials from big guns Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, as well as smaller outfit Origin PC, so those are some likely candidates.

Late last month, we got a clue as to how quickly the storage giant looks to be moving away from mechanical-only hard drives when a Seagate executive told X-bit Labs(Opens in a new window) that the company will cease building 2.5-inch 7200rpm HDDs for high-end laptops by the end of this year.

Seagate will continue to make 5400rpm mechanical drives for lower-end notebook PCs, however.