Seagate Announces Hard Drives For Tablets

Mechanical hard drives in state of the art portable technology is a step in the wrong direction in my opinion.

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.

It 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.

"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.

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...

For 30 years, and with the help of black-ops, little Ronnie has been trying to get to the 1284 Beefer's girls.

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.

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.

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.

I am a marketing guy, doing financial analysis in a high tech company...anyway, 70% of the market are parents, and all of these products are going to their kids. The tablets are multimedia devices. If manufacturers are smart enough, they will create unified replaceable storage drives and batteries in the very near future, thus mimicking the laptops in evolution. Which means I would bet my corporate investments on Android or future Windows. Apple iOS and current generation tablets are aging way too fast as a concept in this market.

I think any mobile harddrive is a step in the wrong direction!
They already messed up the netbook market by equipping them with super slow harddrives!
Please, not the tablet market too!

Besides, android OS takes up less than 200MB in size, and all you can download in a day (even on a fast connection) would fit on one or two SD cards!

Having the increased capacity is just what people want so they don't have to depend on 'the cloud' and watch their kids have a meltdown when rural Kansas doesn't have 3G. I like to travel with a netbook for that very reason: I can take ALL of my media with me, AND it has the option to get more on the road. A single movie is easily a gig or two, and what parent doesn't have their whole collection of 'Disney Favorites' with them for road trips?
Also, what 'cheap' SSDs are people referring to? Yes the performance is 10 times that of HDDs, but they are 20 times more expensive per gig. HDDs have still far more than adequate performance for streaming media.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!! You are obviously not a parent! Children with no entertainment ruin vacations faster than a tornado ruins a trailer park! Cries of "I'm BORED!" are a buzzkill from hell! These little buggers are going to be a blessing for parents going on long roadtrips, flights and to family gatherings of the sort where anyone under 18 is pretty much ignored in favor of seeing people you haven't seen in ages, that happens to be at an elderly family member's home that doesn't have cable or the 600 channels the little blaggard's are used to having at home. Or during Granddad's slideshow of he and Grandma's latest trip to where ever!

Technology evolves because children can no longer be disciplined in the ways that worked for... Ohh... roughly 10,000 years prior to the late 20th century. Ain't it grand?

ARCHOS tablets are priced comparatively and it’s good to see tablets below the $400 price tag.

Great idea! Not everyone is willing to pay the Apple type pricing associated with most tablets.

lets see here, what would i do with a tablet... id put video on it, lots of movies. id put pictures on it, porn and what i take.

movies, lets say i put 10 on there, that is about 15-20gb of sapce already, and picutes i take would be another 30 gb of space, and top it off with porn euqaling another 100gb of space.

i would want it to last at least 5 years, so lets say 10 movies a year, and another 50gb total or images and porn. so 100gb more for movies, and 50 for pics ant it all comes to about 300gb drive is needed.

show me the tablet that has 300gb of space and ill show you the most overpriced thing on the planet.

these hdds are GREAT for what i want to use a tablet for.

you have a 4-7 year old kid, they complain constantly when they are board, and cant do #$&^. car rides over 1 hour long are an absolute nightmare without some form of entertainment.

unless you have a kid in that age range, you dont have a say in this conversation. what can you do to talk to them for more than 1 hour? come on, do they have life experience that can lead to a conversation? do they know about pop culture and can say something worth hearing? no it would last maybe 10-20 minutes of how their day/week was, and maybe another 10-20 about a cartoon they watch, and thats it.

give them a movie, or something to do, thats all you are able to do, because you cant win an argument with a kid SCREAMING because they are board and there is NOTHING you can do because they always think there is SOMETHING and if they scream loud enough someone will give it to them.

I have multiple of my own, and loving it. You, though, seem to have them, but hate it/them. I'm so sorry. Manic parents are the worst. Seek some assistance.

How about when Windows 8 Tablets hit the market next year? For the same price as that "cheap" 60GB SSD I can get 750GB 7200RPM drive.

How about YOU, the PARENT become your kid's 'entertainment' center ?
It is so sad seeing a commercial of a family in a van touring the country and the kids do not see anything of their own country's beauty because they watch a Disney DVD in the headrest infront of them. Observed live while driving behind them along the south rim of the Grand Canyon ! Sad, so very sad.

Is there even such a thing called a cheap SSD? You can easily triple that space in the same cost with platter drives.



You Cant force children to appreciate the things you like. They are by every means, different people than you and share different likes, and/or interests. When they grow up, they change, I Know many adults in life who care not about travelling or anything else, i've even known people who haven't even left the country, and I live 15 minutes from the USA, where I happen to drive to AT FREE WILL. Not everyone is going to like the same thing. My mom was one who didnt like to give me freedom and run around by myself when away(16years old) Though I learned to appreciate stuff like that when i discovered wikipedia has articles for cities and places all over the world with pictures. Also, when I was a child, my parents weren't exactly entertainment centres. Parents are considered boring for children. alot of them are out of date. besides, there isnt much you can talk about with a parent when you are a child. While i got used to hour long drives to Toronto. Cross country Canada/USA is pushing it for children to have no entertainment and seeing nothing but trees and rocks for days on end.

It's hilarious how this became an argument about who is the better parent and how to properly raise other people's kids. The internet is great for the conceited.

I for one welcome the entrance of high-capacity and affordable storage solutions for tablets and thin laptops.

However, the Seagate part worries me, personally.

True, but your tablet will run slower than snail feces in january.