Tablets are great for many things where you want a bigger screen than a mobile, but you might not want to cart a laptop around. Take, for example, international travel. In flight movies aren’t terribly good quality, so you might like to take your own with you to watch on a tablet. I do.
However, if you’ve done this, you’ll probably have found the same thing I did: 32gb of on-board storage isn’t always enough, especially if you like to take some music and photos with you as well.
Well, worry at night no more. Seagate, already known for their 5mm hard drives in laptop-land, have announced their Ultra Mobile HDD product. It’s a 500GB drive coupled with an 8GB flash cache for fast performance, featuring a toughened enclosure and firmware specially designed for low energy consumption and shock tolerance. This means your tablet could have as much storage as your laptop (or more, in my case) in a slim, easy to carry about form factor.
Seagate hasn’t announced any OEM customers yet, or ship dates for the hard drives, but I think it’s safe to say that we’ll see these kind of storage options in the tablets of tomorrow. I can’t imagine a Nexus 7 with one of these drives on board — they’re far too small, and the drives too large, to fit — but larger tablets, of the 8 to 10 inch varieties, may well be able to accommodate them.
What are your thoughts? Want more storage in your tablet? What would you use it for?
i’m totally thinking that aftermarket or genuine covers with pogo points and a sleeve to slip your ultra mobe HDD into are coming on the back of this. i mean, think of the genuine N7 (2012) sleeve, but with HDD connectivity whilst docked in the sleeve, connectivity through a new spec pogo pin setup or through micro usb piggy back with a micro usb still offered out the other side for charging or whatever. that makes me think, wouldnt it be better for goog to sell a multimedia N7 dock for tab only, and a multimedia N7 dock for when… Read more »