Many of the 2.5″ hard drives designed for laptop, notebook and netbook applications use glass platters. The glass platters can be manufactured with smoother and flatter surfaces which allow the heads to be flown closer to the disk surface. This in turn allows the manufactures to increase the density and store more data in the same space.

However, glass isn’t exactly known for its indestructibility and this picture illustrates the problems. This Western Digital laptop drive originally had two disks but the top disk has shattered into a hundred pieces. No useful data will be recoverable in this situation.