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Big Jump For Tablet Storage: Seagate Intros 5mm Hard Disk For Tablets
cold fjord writes "ZDNet reports, 'Seagate on Monday took the wraps off a hard drive designed for tablets that brings 7x the storage capacity of a 64GB device with the same performance as a Flash drive. The drive, the Seagate Ultra Mobile HDD, uses software to boost performance. The idea is that Android tablet manufacturers will use the Seagate drive, along with the company's mobile enablement kit and caching software, to up the storage. The 2.5-inch drive is 5 mm thin and weighs 3.3 ounces. As for capacity, the drive has 500GB---enough for 100,000 photos and 125,000 songs.' More at The Wall Street Journal."
no thanks. I'm more interested in moveing devices from mechanical to solid state, not the other way around.
that you can't access because the battery is dead.
With PCs, a piece of hardware could start of as an add-on for enthusiasts, then be integrated by an OEM if it was gaining traction. (Accelerated 3d graphics, for example, caught on this way). But tablets and cellphones are so monolithic that end-user swapping of storage is practically impossible.
Couldn't we just say 500gb up front and be done with it, instead of having a bogus multiplier on a meaningless size? What's next, "this hard drive holds 30 Library of Congresses, which are each 6x the capacity of a regular library?"
I'm not keen to have spinning parts in a device that I drop a couple times a day.
"100,000 photos and 125,000 songs"
Technically inclined people do not measure storage capacity in this way. This is pure marketing babble for Common Joe who doesn't know what filesize is.
Why?
Literally, throw tables on tables, drop them on the floor, all sorts of shit.
Seagate needs to get on the SSD bandwagon or shut up. A tablet with moving parts is pretty retarded.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
These things better be really reliable, because a tablet is going to get used in all sorts of angles, is likely to be jostled around a lot more, and might find itself in a case where the accelerometer of the device is being used to control a game.
SSD has the benefit of not having moving parts ... a tablet or a phone sounds like the last place you'd want a spinning platter to be used.
And 3oz is, what, just shy of a quarter pound? What does the 64GB of flash memory we're comparing this to weigh?
Sounds like trying to turn a tablet into a laptop or something.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There's are very practical and unchangeable reasons why mobile devices use flash devices for storage instead of hard drives... and I'm really kind of surprised that Seagate would not have already realized this.
Moving parts means that the device is inherently more fragile... less resilient to shock, and introduces points of physical failure that don't exist with solid state storage.
A spinning hard drive means that you're going to be wasting a whole lot of energy driving the motor... probably more than order of magnitude more than what it takes to use flash storage. This means that you will need bulkier and heavier batteries, which makes the device less practical for carrying around everywhere.
Seagate... no. Just no.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When everyone is moving from magnetic storage to solid state storage, Seagate is going against the tide.
Storage media with moving parts are bad enough for laptops, let alone tablets that get moved around a lot, dropped, sat on, etc.
If Seagate suits really want to see this thing fly, it'd be much more interesting to put these drives into laptop for some badass RAID arrays.
Firstly, going from solid state back to a mechanical drive is a step backward.
Secondly, Seagate. Enough said.
I tried using one of the compact flash format hard drive many moons ago. Stupid things would break with the slightest bump.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
A device with no moving parts counts as basically indestructible (under normal circumstances) as long as the screen doesn't crack. Cracking the screen takes a hell of a lot more force than crashing a HDD head into the platter whirring just a few microns below it.
And as another perk, strong magnetic fields largely don't affect flash, until you start getting into strengths that pose a health risk to the human using the tablet. The standard method of wiping a HDD uses a relatively weak (on the "causes human damage" scale of things) 60hz magnetic field.
The WSJ article says:
"a mobile device using 8GB of flash and the Ultra Mobile HDD and Dynamic Data Driver software have the power consumption equal to that of a 64GB tablet and the performance equal to that of a 16GB tablet-- while costing less than either"
That means that it would cost less than an 8GB flash drive, which I find very hard to believe since even a 16GB UHS 1 / class 10 drive is about $16 now. I can't see Seagate selling these things for $10.
...because of surface-to-volume and scaling considerations, the smaller these things get, the less fragile they get. I dropped my iPod Mini (rotating drive) at least as often as I dropped my current flash-memory iPod and never had a problem. Yes, battery life is an issue. Quite possibly, service life might be an issue (bearing wear).
Seagate is claiming 400 Gs maximum operating shock. I, um, gee, well truthfully I have no idea what that means in practical terms but it seems like a big number to me. They are claiming 80 Gs for the first desktop drive I looked at.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Seems like Seagate is merely trying to breathe some last breaths into a dying technology. I cannot fathom the need to have a half gig of storage on a smart phone at this point in the technology, and when it does potentially become necessary flash memory will still be the better option.
There are already at least 480GB (close enough to 500, in books) **mSATA** SSD drives (Mushkin made the first I know of), which makes the drive in this post positively gargantuan.
You would think so, but I beg to differ. I've had 2 Kobo eReaders fail on me, both in less than 6 months (second was a replacement unit). In the first case, the thing just got stuck on a reboot loop, so that's some kind of firmware error as far as I could figure, still unfixable from my point of view. Second was half the screen being stuck, which is a hardware error. I've had plenty of solid state devices die over the years. Possibly more often than I've had mechanical devices fail.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
and call for msata to be added to tablets?
There are already 512 gig drives on the msata scale and they're tiny (51 x 30 x 0.8mm) so, why re-introduce mechanical harddrives which are larger?
These tablets would be better with more storage, but that's not all they're missing. For one, it'd be nice to have a full keyboard. A more precise pointing device could be useful as well, perhaps attached to the keyboard. A real operating system like Microsoft Windows would be good too.
Imagine a tablet with a keyboard, a trackpad, hard-drive, powerful x86 CPU, and running Windows!
Putting 8GB of flash cache in front of a 5400RPM hard drive is not going to give you the performance of a pure flash drive. I don't care how good your caching algorithm is or how many rigged benchmarks you win (comparing only on sequential read/write doesn't count!), you're not going to be as fast. Particularly since flash scales performance with size - a 64GB SSD will be faster than an 8GB SSD of the same type, ignoring any hard drives it may be a cache for.
Will it be "SSD-like performance"? Probably, yeah. If their caching algorithm isn't complete shit, it'll probably be somewhere in the upper half of the two orders of magnitude that separate flash and disc. But "within an order of magnitude of" and "equal" are not at all the same thing.
I wouldn't call them desperate but I think they are seriously underestimated the intelligence level of their customers.
-Matt
Which of those problems would not have been just as likely with a Mechanical HDD installed? Neither of those sound like they are likely to be related to the drive being solid state.
"The idea is that Android tablet manufacturers will use the Seagate drive, along with the company's mobile enablement kit and caching software, to up the storage."
They will use the "enablement kit" to "up the storage." Does that mean it's not really 500GB, but some smaller capacity that is made to be 500GB through software?
Maybe they just licensed DBLSPACE.BIN from Microsoft?
I love the jumble of Imperial and SI units in the summary. Great work!
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
I'm genuinely interested in hearing what the benefits of this are. It seems like mSATA drives are more or less on parity with this in terms of size and capacity, but have the benefit of increased longevity, reduced noise, and lower power consumption.
I honestly think spinning hard disks are going to go the way of CRTs within the next 5 to 10 years. And there's a high probability Segate will go with it.
Back in my day, we used a ragged piece of orange duct tape and a portable mechanical 320 GB seagate for our tablet storage and we liked it.
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Seagate is claiming 400 Gs maximum operating shock. I, um, gee, well truthfully I have no idea what that means in practical terms but it seems like a big number to me.
A 100G impact will turn a human being into a collection of loosely assembled parts with an infinitesimal chance for restoration to correct function.
A 400G impact will turn a human being into goo.
The other night, I was watching Netflix in bed on my iPad. It was propped up on my chest, and I was using one hand to hold it upright. Well, at one point, my hand slipped, and the iPad flopped at what must have been light speed right onto my nose. Ever been hit on the nose by something hard? My eyes were watering, and the pain didn't go away for what seemed like millenia.
Anyhow, I'm not sure what might have happened to a spinning hard disk in this case, but I AM sure my nose would have hurt just as much.
Have you seen a teardown of a tablet? There is no space for a 2.5 inch drive. Tablets are mostly battery, SoC, and radios - there is no space for 2.5 inches of hard drive. Not going to happen unless it goes into a 12 inch or larger tablet.
A 400G impact will turn a human being into goo.
Whilst the factors responsible for the concussion are complex, it is generally accepted that the human brain can withstand crash impact forces of 300-400 G without either concussion or skull fracture, provided that there is no local deformation of the skull to inflict direct injury.
I honestly didn't expect that when I did the search.
A device with no moving parts counts as basically indestructible (under normal circumstances) as long as the screen doesn't crack.
Sorry, folks, but these editors need to be keelhauled, boiled in oil, or tarred and feathered. When I see "5mm hard disk" in a headline that has no summary on the front page, I think that this is a micro-sized HDD that is 5mm wide. That would be an incredible jump in density! In fact, this is a STANDARD 2.5in sized HDD that is only 5mm thick. They have been making HDDs roughly this size FOR YEARS.
Occasionally, I come back here to read some "news," and I am quickly refreshed on why this site has sunken into the abyss.
I thought they were talking about a 5mm diameter hard drive, seeing as hard drive sizes have been reported in diameter for as long as I can remember. I was wondering how they were going to engineer something that small and still have a useful storage size. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seagate just started down the path towards becoming irrelevant.
Well, typical ceramic/glass/china dishes are generally good for 100-125Gs of impact force. So, about 3x as durable as your mom's good tableware. Which is good, but probably not drive-away-with-it-on-the-top-of-your-car good.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Why would a wall Street journal have more storage?
You'd be surprised how little acceleration you need to shear solder joints on fine pitch devices if you get the vector just right.
but how many Libraries of Congress?
--
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These are a bad idea for most tablet-type applications.
I can easily see these replacing thicker 2.5" drives in laptops and stationary devices like set-top boxes.
I can also see server-class versions of these and other "thin as possible" drives being used in rack-mounted server- or rack-mounted-disk-farms, provided heat doesn't become an issue.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So if I pay the WSJ to reprint my press release (which is what Segate did), will Slashdot post my marketing copy too?
Let's compare this drive to the size of an iPad mini (because I'm familiar with that tablet, insert your own tablet of choice).
This drive is 2.5" still; that's huge compared to the size of an iPad mini, 512GB of surface-mounted flash is half that size or less.
It is 5mm thick, the iPad mini is 7.2mm thick. Would there even be room for the screen? 512GB of flash is less than half that.
It weighs 1/3 of the weight of an iPad mini as well. 512G of flash is a rounding error by comparison.
In short, this is a company that was caught flat-footed by the rise of SSDs because they were too busy thinking about how to preserve their hard drive business. Now they are desperately trying to push spinning rust to the limit and still falling well short. The only thing they can do is sell them for dirt-cheap prices. That also probably means the scaling of hard drives will slow or stop at this generation as SSD sales cut the profit out of that market, thus reducing the capital available for R&D and deployment of new HDD technologies.
I'm in an all-flash household now, I have no desire to go back to spinning disks. I don't have a lot of data points to back it up but so far I have zero failures in the past three years since I installed my first SSD, compared to no less than four HDD failures in the previous three year period.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
It's an iteration of the CompactFlash Microdrive format, really, not so revolutionary. I've got a 4GB Hitachi Microdrive bought maybe 5 years ago. The platter is probably about the same diameter, though with an obvious increase in areal density.
The drive is the 2.5" form factor, 5 mm thick. That's slimmer than what shows up in most laptops, but I would wager it is still larger than what is allocated to storage in most tablets. How many tablets use a 2.5" form factor drive, even if it is SSD? In most cases, it's a collection of flash chips soldered directly to the logic board.
400G would definitely resolve that complaint, but shoving an enormous HDD into a tablet (roughly 35 cubic centimetres) is silly. That's a laptop-sized drive that would be too big for an ultrabook, let alone a tablet. Shrinking it down from 7mm to 5mm doesn't magically make it appropriate. That's many many times more volume than the eMMC in tablets consume... that's enough for an extra ~26 Wh of battery capacity, which is more than half the battery capacity of an iPad.
To put those "enormous" 35 cubic centimeters into perspective, that's roughly 1.5mm thickness on a 10" tablet.
How big will the battery have to be to compare with the power usage of Solid State Memory in tablets. I like my tablet because it will run for 10 hours between charges. Who is going to be happy with a tablet that has to be recharged every 2~3 hours?
A hard drive in a device that gets moved and jostled around is a terrible idea. I've had a few such devices and they fail way before the battery does. Not good.
We all know and respect Seagate for what they do, but honestly, what were they thinking here? Was their Exploit-All-Market-Niches-Even-The-Imaginary-Ones-Department REALLY in need of a win to stave off a challenge from the Bum-Photocopying Department for an award at the Christmas party or something?
The concept of putting a spinning HDD into a tablet is so diametrically opposed to the ethos of the whole tablet concept that this is mind-boggling. Not only does this violate the entire concept of moving forward technologically, but Tablets are supposed to be slabs of chips with reduced fragility that you don't have to worry about too much. Can you imagine giving a tablet with a HDD in it to one of your kids? Or even an adult residing in the less-dexterous half of the bell curve? To say nothing of the power consumption. And no, don't even talk to me about the leaps that have been made in HDD power efficiency.
Sorry Seagate. We love you, but go home, you're drunk.
Seriously, slashdot, we're down to including quotes from articles about how many "photos" and "songs" x GB is?
Yes, Tablet are need bigger storage.
But instead of trying hard to push the HDD limit, why they did not try harder to make SSD much better and cheaper.
the future of the mobile storage are SSD. and Not HDD.
Less space than a Nomad.
A Sega Nomad with an EverDrive-MD adapter has 2 GB. Among iPod products, only the first-generation iPod nano and the first- and second-generation iPod shuffle have less space.
A device with a firmware (read: software) issue is not destroyed and if you have any understanding of how e-ink displays work, you'll realize that there are most definitely moving parts involved, even if only on a microscopic level.
Firmware problems/human problems!
When you're talking about 8mm thick tablets, that's a pretty hefty increase to get some spinning rust in there.
A human falling from a given height, has anywhere from a millimeters (worst-case: head impact) to a couple feet (best-case: feet down, knees bent) of "squish" to decelerate over. Tablets have their "cranium" (rigid case with all shock-sensitive parts directly attached) exposed with no more than a couple millimeters of crumple zone, no matter which way they land.
The human also masses a lot more, so they'll get a lot more give out of the elasticity of the surface they land on.
The tablet will suffer a much higher deceleration from the same height -- the single exception being if the human's unlucky enough to land on his head on a surface with negligible elasticity, in which case they might be similar; with that in mind, how useful is it to compare G-ratings for mobile electronics with the effects of the same acceleration on the human body? A sibling post comparing it to tableware seems far more applicable.
This could be what MS is looking for. After all, netbooks didn't ship with hardrives until MSFT entered the fray. This way MSFT can kill off another market that they've failed to dominate.
Too little - too late. SSD will soon catch up and completely obsolete this otherwise nice product.
In my junk pile I have a 20GB 1.8" form factor x 5mm disc... circa 2005 it was made by Toshiba. A year later Toshiba had another one that was slightly smaller that was also 5mm thick and had 30GB storage. Sorry I just don't see how this 'new' design is much of an improvement. These drives were readily available up to 160GB at a time when 2.5" drives were only a little cheaper and about 25% larger storage.
If Toshiba and Samsung had kept up with this format, this would be a non-story. Both of these OEMs make a lot of FLASH... and they could see where the market was headed... Now Seagate is late to the party with a drive that is simply too big to fit the devices they want to target... 5mm was acceptable when tablets and iPods were 1.5cm thick, but now... the devices are thinner and the battery takes up as much volume as can be squeezed out of all the other components.
500GB of Failsauce!