Tablets to come with hard drives'¦ from Seagate!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 24 June 2011 12:17

Your IT - Mobility

Seagate has unveiled hard drives specifically designed for tablet computers, promising 'unmatched price-performance storage', granting tablets vastly improved storage capacities, but presumably means you'll need to treat your hard-drive enabled tablet a touch more carefully than you probably already do.

One of the benefits of today's 'Post-PC' era of tablets has been the use of flash storage technology, granting not only performance benefits but an extra level of shock-proofness and data security from not having any moving parts.

Now, it has to be said that hard drives in tablets are nothing new - Microsoft has had tablets for a decade, and the vast majority of those came with hard drives.

However, in the iPad era, hard drives and tablets never seemed destined to co-exist in the same device, but with Seagate's new tablet-optimised hard drives, that looks certain to change.

Naturally, part of the reason why is because of the vastly greater storage capacities that hard drives offer for the same price as flash storage, and while hard drives might be slower than flash (it depends on the speed of the hard drive and the speed of the flash in question), there are clearly those who will prefer the choice of more storage for the same money.

The first two modern tablet computers to come with hard drives are from Archos - the Archos G9 tablets in 8 and 10-inch sizes. The announcement was made 'today in Paris', and both feature Seagate's 'Momentus Thin' hard drive, listed as a 'speedy notebook drive with a super-slim 7mm profile'.

Seagate boasts that 'the performance and capacity of the Momentus Thin drive are the perfect complement for the cutting-edge speed of the ARCHOS G9 family of tablets that features the industry's fastest dual-core 1.5 GHz processor and, on the strength of the Momentus Thin drive, gives users 250GB of capacity, eight times more than a standard 32GB tablet but at the same cost, making the ARCHOS G9 one of the tablet industry's best cost-performance values.'

In a bit of cross promotion, Seagate notes that Archos's 80 G9, the 8-inch model, and the Archos 101 G9, the 10-inch model, are available for what one can only assume are US dollars, listed at $279 and $349 respectively, with Seagate noting that 'competing tablets' start at $499, with more info at the Archos site.

Rocky Pimentel, Seagate's Chief Sales and Marketing Officer said that: 'Seagate continues to break new ground in the development of products and technologies that matter most to customers by delivering the Momentus Thin drive for these powerful ARCHOS tablets. The Momentus Thin drive gives tablet buyers a compelling option, providing great storage capacity and performance that dovetail with the processing power of the new ARCHOS products for great Android and multimedia experiences.'

Presumably keen to get other tablet makers on board, Seagate says its Momentus Thin hard drive 'is ideal for tablet computers and other ultra-portables, entry-level to high-performance laptop PCs, and slim consumer electronics devices.'

It's at this point that Seagate also says this new drive is 'the world's first 2.5-inch hard drive with a 7mm profile', and features the following:

- Seagate SmartAlign technology to smooth the transition to 4K sectors without the need for software utilities
- 320GB, 250GB and 160GB capacities
- 7200RPM and 5400RPM spin speeds with 16MB of cache

There's also the 'optional' feature of 'Government-grade encryption to protect computer data where it lives - on the hard drive - for powerful data security', with Seagate noting its new drive is 'FIPS 140-2 certified, delivering government-grade encryption, and conforms to the Trusted Computing Group Opal specification, developed to enable the ecosystem for self-encrypting drives and increase their adoption.'

So'¦ hard drives have come to tablets anew, bidding adieu to the notion that flash storage ruled the tablet storage space, while bringing the kinds of capacities computer users are familiar with to tablet computing scenarios.

May the storage price wars continue!