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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.
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.
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.
He said 500GB. He gave the technically-inclined measurement, and then the Common Joe measurement. What's the problem?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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.
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.
The problem is he's given it as if they've achieved "7x the storage capacity of a 64GB device", which is quite disingenuous, because the two aren't the same.
It's kind of like saying this dump truck has 13x the storage capacity of your sedan -- which might be true, but you're talking about entirely different things. Of course, there are drawbacks to that dump truck and you can't use it for all of the same applications as your sedan.
A 64GB flash storage is an arbitrary thing -- so you're only 3.5x better than a 128GB iPad for instance, but it's 250 times better than a 2GB USB stick. Which pretty much makes the numbers meaningless to compare.
This entire article could be written as "HDDs getting smaller, could also be used in tablets".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Disk drives act like gyroscopes, however smaller drives can stop faster and have less rotational momentum at the same RPM.
Flash is shock sensitive too. I've ruined USB flash sticks by dropping them. I hate moving parts too, but I think it's possible to make a mechanical drive less shock sensitive then flash with the proper safety features. Your experience with standard drives isn't really relevant to these new mobile drives because they are very different physically.
I say give them a chance and we will see how they perform.
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;
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.
Flash is NOT shock sensitive, check out this link for proof. Cheap USB sticks with bad sodder jobs or cheap PCB's might be subject to shock but the flash itself is most certainly NOT.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Addendum: if the tablet makers (and others hadn't turned their backs on the CF format in favor of the smaller-but-performance-challenged SD and MicroSD formats, they would have been better positioned to deal with higher capacity micro-platter storage like this as a consumer add-on years ago. Then we'd now be seeing 500GB user-swappable CF cards instead of this internal fixed storage.