Transient measurements of thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and specific heat capacity have been performed with hot disk sensors in thin samples of metallic materials. With this new variation of the hot disk method the sample size can be reduced to a volume less than ten cubic centimeters for copper at room temperature. It is also shown that the specific heat capacity can be conveniently measured in transient recordings of slightly longer duration. On comparing with standard values the accuracy turns out to be better than 1% while the precision (standard deviation of the mean from six measurements) on the average is about 0.5% for all values recorded. ©1994 American Institute of Physics.