Seagate Announces Hard Drives For Tablets

News
By Kevin Parrish
published

Two ARCHOS tablets revealed on Thursday sport Seagate's new Momentus Thin 9-mm hard drives.

Thursday Seagate officially launched its new Momentus Thin line of HDDs in conjunction with the introduction of the upcoming ARCHOS 80 G9 8-inch tablet and the ARCHOS 101 G9 10.1-inch tablet, both of which will feature a Momentus Thin drive. The company is promoting the new HDD line as the "world's first" ultra-thin 2.5-inch hard drives for ultra portables including tablets and slim laptops.

"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," said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. "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."

According to Seagate, the Momentus Thin line is also ideal for entry-level to high-performance laptops, and slim consumer electronic devices (other than tablets and slim laptops). The list of features include a 7-mm profile, Seagate SmartAlign technology to smooth the transition to 4K sectors without the need for software utilities, 7200RPM and 5400RPM spin speeds with 16 MB of cache, optional government-grade encryption, and capacities of 320 GB, 250 GB and 160 GB.

As for the ARCHOS tablets, the company has chosen the 250 GB model for both tablets, offering an insane amount of storage when compared to other flash-based solutions installed in today's crop of tablets (iPad 2, Galaxy Tab etc). As revealed on Thursday, the upcoming ARCHOS tablets will also feature the 1.5 GHz dual-cre OMAP4 processor from Texas Instruments, Google's Android 3.1 "Honeycomb" OS, HDMI output, a microSD card slot, a USB port and more. Archos will also offer Flash-based versions as well for those who don't want to deal with the thicker, heavier HDD-based models.

ARCHOS 80 G9, the 8-inch product, and ARCHOS 101 G9, the 10-inch model, are scheduled to be available in late September. Estimated MSRPs for the ARCHOS 80 G9 and ARCHOS 101 G9 tablets are $279 and $349, respectively.

So are these Archos devices actually tablets, or slates? With only a 3-mm difference between the flash-based and HDD-based models, it seems that the line between tablet and slate is growing thinner and thinner... like mobile hard drives.

Kevin Parrish
24 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Mechanical hard drives in state of the art portable technology is a step in the wrong direction in my opinion.
    Reply
  • phatboe
    I disagree emtu, while I do believe there is a place for SSD in tablets, there are those of us who wold prefer the larger capacity, lower cost HDD for their tablets. These larger capacity HDD's will come in very handy for those of us who enjoy multimedia consumption to a large degree on their tablets.
    Reply
  • serkol
    It will be god for things like going on a 2 week vacation with kids and bringing 20 hi-def movies along.
    Reply
  • lamorpa
    serkolIt will be god for things like going on a 2 week vacation with kids and bringing 20 hi-def movies along.How about going on a 2-week vacation and leaving behind the movies, and even the tablet itself for that matter. If you need the media that bad, stay home.
    Reply
  • "Estimated MSRPs for the ARCHOS 80 G9 and ARCHOS 101 G9 tablets are $279 and $349, respectively."

    That's SSD money, so why pay SSD money for an HDD? This is like those ultra high capacity 3.5" disks that were to supersede 1.44MB but were replaced before they reached adoption by USB Flash drives.
    Reply
  • jacobdrj
    lamorpaHow about going on a 2-week vacation and leaving behind the movies, and even the tablet itself for that matter. If you need the media that bad, stay home.
    Unless it is a 'stay-cation' it is precisely because you are traveling that you need the media in the 1st place. Until they invent teleportation devices, the car/plane ride takes time, and kids can get bored quick, particularly if they can't read yet or have their own music collections...
    Reply
  • txsouthpaw
    For 30 years, and with the help of black-ops, little Ronnie has been trying to get to the 1284 Beefer's girls.
    Reply
  • rombot
    Yes, yes kids must be pacified and entertained constantly. Do you really expect someone to take a two hour car ride and have a conversation with these little monsters? No way man! Better get 20HD movies for the in flight entertainment. Make sure all the titles bolster a sense of self worth and entitlement. I can see the youth of today are in short supply of both.
    Reply
  • jacobdrj
    You have some options. You can do what has been done since the invention of the automobile and deal with kids in the car... A time honored tradition of siblings fighting, yelling, kicking, screaming, not-not touching and the like, with the occasional road game/song... Or, you could let them use this time, as they always would, by watching some in flight/ride entertainment.

    Personally, I consider the latter an improvement over the former (from oodles of experience being that kid without, and then with, including the progression of Detroit-Daytona Beach drives before and after the invention of the affordable PMP) and I therefore choose the latter for my self and eventually my family...

    Nobody is forcing you to do it, and if you think that there is little to no value in large capacity PMPs, you are under no obligation to buy or use them.

    It is just an additional option in the marketplace, and I appreciate having the option...

    Of course, I'd rather use a simple inexpensive laptop rather than a 'slate', but hey, that is just me... And the advantage of an inexpensive laptop is I can quickly swap out HHD/SSDs, so that I can have the best of what I need when I need it...

    More options is 'more better' for consumers.

    Also, by creating more drives with higher capacities, this puts more pressure on SSD manufacturers to keep pushing the capacity envelope.
    Reply
  • thrasher32
    I agree with the first poster, ssd's are the way to go with tablets, just put a cheap 60gb SSD in there and keep the cost down. You shouldn't need much more than that in a tablet, if you do, maybe a laptop might be a better choice.
    Reply