Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Seagate teams with Archos on 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

By Rachel King | June 23, 2011, 9:30am PDT

Most tablets on the market today host solid state drives and flash memory. Archos has introduced two new tablet computers with Seagate physical hard drives on board.

Touted as the “world’s first handheld tablet computers with hard drives,” the 8-inch Archos 80 G9 and 10-inch Archos 101 G9 sport 2.5-inch Seagate Momentus Thin hard drives. Those hard drives have 7mm profiles and capacity options are set at 320GB, 250GB and 160GB. The last nitty-gritty detail about the hard drives specifically is that buyers can opt for 7200RPM and 5400RPM spin speeds with 16MB of cache.

For those who might want to use these tablets for business and/or host sensitive data on those Momentus Thin hard drives, there are some extra (optional) security measures, including government-grade encryption to protect data.

Most other details about the tablets haven’t been publicized, except that these slates run on 1.5GHz processors. We should know more about these Seagate tablets closer to their unspecified release date in late September.

Based on pricing alone, these tablets appear competitive as the Archos 80 G9 and Archos 101 G9 have starting prices of $279 and $349, respectively. However, we’ll need to know more about the operating system and other features, before comparing it to other tablets already available.

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More from “Between the Lines”

FTC reportedly eyes antitrust probe of Google: Is search giant too dominant?

ComScore: Apple's iPad dominates tablet traffic globally

Topics

Hard Drive, Seagate Technology LLC, Tablets, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Rachel King

Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Cylon Centurion 23rd Jun

Tablets should only have flash memory. I feel they would be taking too much abuse to have an actual hard drive. Not to mention the device will be slower as a result.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

FeralUrchin 23rd Jun

@Cylon Centurion

My iPod has a 160GB disk drive, and after a couple of years it is still running reliably.

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Forgot the iPods didn't you?

kdjkdj@... 24th Jun

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

rengek 24th Jun

@Cylon Centurion
My first archos tablet has a hard drive and its 5 years old. Haven't failed me yet. Ditto for those hundreds of millions of laptops out there with physical hard drives. And if you are putting that much abuse on your tablet, your HD is probably not the first thing that will make your tablet unusable. Lets not even get into flash memory's limited life span compared to HDD.

But ask me if I want a paltry 32gig on my tablet or 250 gigs....no brainer. If you're lucky 32gigs will hold 10 HD movies and nothing else.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

browser. 23rd Jun

Hard drives! Ha ha.. So we going a decade backwards?

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Hardly. Just making things the best they can be.

Cayble 23rd Jun

@browser.
Not backward at all. In case you haven't noticed, most true computing devices around the world still use hard drives. They are still the most cost efficient method of data storage. They are also more reliable then ever.

And hard drive use actually solves one of the numerous serious glitches of the iPad; ridiculously little storage for such a large price tag.

And just to show you how smug and ridiculous you sound, please point out where one could purchase a 320G 7200 rpm HD with a 7mm profile, at any price, in 2001.

I'm not holding my breath waiting, but please, do us all a favor and don't come back here until you have the example.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Bates_ Updated - 23rd Jun

@Cayble Not sure why you are bringing up the iPad but OK.

And yes they are still widely used for data storage... But let's break that down side by side:

Data Storage Vs. Tablet... Um do I really need to do this seriously? You know what screw it, if you are that much of an ignoramus that this is your argument I am not even going to attempt to explain how far you are from the other end of spectrum here.

The fact that you are even trying to compare tablet storage to overall data storage is just mind boggling.

You know what, why don't we throw some optical tape drives on tablets too, that's still used for data storage too isn't it?

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

snoop0x7b 23rd Jun

@Bates_

Yeah... Enjoy streaming a movie over 3G and wasting your entire data plan in the process.

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The iPad has an option for WiFi streaming portable Seagate HD storage

kenosha77a 23rd Jun

@Cayble and at @snoop0x7b

Since Rachel wrote about a Seagate HD assisted tablet, there is another Seagate HD product that will assist an iPad for off line WiFi connected storage.

Seagate makes the GoFlex Satellite Wireless HD product which has been reviewed by numerous online sources that offers slick integration with an iPad. Seagate's MSRP for this 500 GB portable HD is about two hundred dollars.

Both of you should increase your knowledge base by searching online sources for videos demonstrating the capabilities of this device. In fact, I'm surprised Rachel has not mentioned it before in her blog.

Personally, I don't need that much optional storage with my iPad - 64 GB is quite enough for my needs. But the file manager app bundled with this product is quite slick.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

rparker009 24th Jun

And remember that any form of SDD or other memory based hd. if it dies you are sol for getting your data back. Disc based hds can be recovered.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

rengek 24th Jun

@kenosha7777
And how much would a 64gig flash memory cost..... a lot.
You can argue that you don't need onboard memory for lots of HD movies because you have the cloud. But consider how long transferring that 4 gig HD movie is going to take. So much for on demand.

And let me know how well that works for you on a plane or have no signal.

The point of a tablet is to be mobile and for use on the go. When you are on the go there is no guarantee of remote connection.

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Well, since you asked, rengek, let's do the math regarding 32 GBs

kenosha77a 27th Jun

@rengek

The added costs of a 64 GB iPad over the base unit is two hundred dollars or the same cost of the portable Seagate GoFlex Satellite Wireless 500 GB HD product.

On my 64 GB iPad, I normally have about 32 GB free or roughly free storage space available for seven to eight HD movies.

On a recent airline flight from Michigan to Florida, my air travel time was roughly a little over three hours or the time it would take to view one HD movie.

As luck would have it, that's where I watched Inception, onboard a plane using my iPad and headphones.

If I wanted, I could pay for inflight WiFi and stream a movie but Why??? A little trip preplanning and any movie I wished to view could be transferred from my computer to my iPad in minutes. (after downloading, of course) This technique works just fine during the periods where a flight has no WiFi signal. (BTW, I have that grandfathered true unlimited AT&T 3G data plan. I have have no 3G data cap - one of the perks for being an early tech adopter.

But like I said, if a person truly requires extra WiFi HD storage for his iPad, the Seagate portable HD wireless product solves that need quite nicely. But personally, I don't need it. Having 32 GB free storage space allows me the freedom to install quite a few programs and video material.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

tringo007 27th Sep

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Bates_ 23rd Jun

Way to go Seagate! You found the perfect way to make a tablet heavier, bulkier, slower, more prone to failure, noisier, and hotter! Give yourself a hand Seagate, just a mass of failure all around.

At least they are cheaper lol.

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Simply better.

Cayble 23rd Jun

@Bates_

Guys like you should at least make a minimal effort to get out into the real world once in a while. For starters, how much heavier do you think a 7mm HD is going to be? Seriously?

In the real world, its hardly going to be noticeable. Meanwhile, the storage improvement is going to be immense. And slower? Ha! How much slower? Again, minimal, very minimal. Sure solid state beats a hard disk drive speed wise, but for the vast majority of normal humans its hardly worth giving up 80%-90% of your storage capacity for a minimally quicker drive.

Noisier and hotter?? My lord, now your really grasping at straws! Again, if silence and maximum speed is more important to you then actually being able to do things with a computer, then by all means, invest in a toy like the iPad. If getting work done at a reasonable cost is more important then give the iPad a pass and wait for something not based on just the "Apple magic factor" but on what actually gives you the most bang for your buck. And in the real world, that still means a hard drive.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Bates_ 23rd Jun

@Cayble Yea 10 years ago. Time to get with the times. HDDs have moving parts, which means: They make noise, generate more heat, and are more likely to fail.

Sorry unless they are throwing some 15k RPM (or at least 10k) HDDs in there I will continue to laugh them. Oh that's right , they're not! We get to choose from archaic 5400 laptop worth drives, or standard Desktop 7200 drives. Hooray for a leap 10 years into the past. Cost efficient maybe, but that's it.

Oh and my toy is a ASUS Transformer currently. Thanks for playing!

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

josh92 23rd Jun

@Cayble

The only two advantages to a tablet like this is that it will be cheaper and it has built-in harddrive encryption. Those are the only two benefits. All the downsides have been mentioned by others.

It is, at best, debatable as to whether it is an improvement to put a HDD in a tablet like this.

We'll wait and see as to what the marketplace says about whether this is a good idea or not.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

csteinola 24th Jun

@Cayble Hmmmm... sounds like you're the one that really needs to get out into the real world.

Tablets are not storage devices. Thus, they shouldn't need ginormous storage capacity. Especially with all the (yes, completely valid) cons that @Bates_ pointed out.

Hard drives will ALWAYS run noisier and hotter than solid state flash. That's not grasping at straws. There's this little thing called "friction", perhaps you've heard of it. Two of it's chief byproducts are heat and noise, there's no way around it (unless, I suppose, you're in a vacuum... but I really doubt you'd enjoy operating a tablet in a vacuum). Friction is simply a fact. Actually, it falls under what most call a "law". Spinning hard drives create friction. Solid state drives do not. If you're still not convinced, talk to my buddy who has a Dell laptop that you literally can not have on your lap for longer than 10 minutes when it's running, lest you get severe burns on your thighs.

One of the things I absolutely love about my tablet (and, no, it's not an iPad) is I hit a button and it's instantly up and running. That's it's biggest advantage to me. I have a minute to check my email, I want absolutely none of that time to be eaten up by system boot time. Even with state snapshots, firing up a system that relies on a spinning hard drive will always take longer. That's NOT minimal. And that immediately loses it's appeal for me. If I want to wait for something to boot, I'll go fire up my laptop.

And, if I truly need to store files to access on my tablet, I save them to the cloud. So despite your view of the "real world", a hard drive is completely passe. Your contention of what the "vast majority of normal humans" want is completely outdated.

Lastly, one con that doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet, a hard drive system is always going to consume more power than a solid state system. So, while a hard drive may allow YOU to "get work done" on your tablet, come see me in an hour when you're not able to work anymore because your battery is depleted and, oh, I have 9 hours left on mine.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

rengek Updated - 24th Jun

@josh92
Really those are the only 2 advantage to a HD, price and encryption...maybe think a little harder......how about the fact that it holds 250gigs!! Which do you think has a longer lifespan. Flash memory has limited amount of write life. probably not so significant since I don't expect very many write backs on tablets. But if you only have 32gigs on your tablet that means you have to swap out HD movies often and that does do a lot of rewrites to memory.

Govt grade HD encryption by the way means that it can be used in govt contracts. All govt facilities that handles data requiring security clearance like DoD require all of their desktops and laptops have high grade encryption. The best laptop in the world cannot be used in these facilities if they don't have govt approved encryption. And its not just the offices handling nuclear secrets. Its most govt offices.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

msalzberg 23rd Jun

@Bates_

In case you didn't know (and apparently you didn't), some Compact Flash cards used hard drives (look up "Microdrive"). Canon used them in some of their DSLRs. I never had a problem with one, and weight, bulk, noise or heat were never an issue.

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Slower? I'm afraid...

UrNotPayingAttention 23rd Jun

@Bates_

that the difference between a spindle and flash is so negligible, you wouldn't notice unless you were trying to manage data larger than 32 GB... which your Asus won't accomodate anyways. Oh? you've got an SD slot? you really thing that's going to be anywhere near as fast as a spindle?

Heh. "thanks for playing", indeed.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

datrappert 24th Jun

@Bates_ Most things I read say SSDs are more prone to failure.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

snoop0x7b 24th Jun

@datrappert Depends on what type of failure. SSDs have a limited number of write cycles, but that's a fairly large number. However, the read write-head on an SSD can't crash.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

rparker009 24th Jun

@Bates_
Well if you look at the stats. ssd have a much high rate of failure and no way to recover when they do. And I would love to have a 500 GB tablet

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

rengek 24th Jun

@Bates_
My archos tablet of 5 years with a HDD makes no noise and I have never felt any heat on it. Perhaps you are thinking of laptops and making the assumption its the same on archos devices which shows on much you know.

7200rpm 7mm drive is pretty fast. Hate to burst your bubble. But you can always embrace your icloud. I'm sure its quiet and cool to the touch. And when ipad 4 decides to use 7mm drives you can then claim apple did it again with their awesome innovation.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

nfordtchrpub 24th Jun

@rengek
My Archos 70-250G has a 250GB hard drive and likewise makes no noise. Because it's a 7" device, I can carry it while walking to watch movies, read books, etc., and I've never noticed any heat from it.

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Great idea!

FeralUrchin 23rd Jun

One way to look at the difficulty with Android software quality and support on tablets is to consider that Google and the OEMs currently view Android as "firmware" rather than "software". Firmware is similar to hardware in that, once released, it tends to remain relatively unmodified.

I want choices about what software runs on my tablet. By removing storage limitations hopefully more choices will surface about what software can be run on tablets--assuming, of course, that the OS can be booted from disk.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

virthddman 23rd Jun

Will need to know more to know how interested I would be - but sounds like it has possibilities.

Android device security is important - I recommend 2x mobiledevicemanager
Download at http://www.2x.com/mobiledevicemanager
or from the Android Market

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Scrabbler 23rd Jun

A tablet with a hard drive?
I thought one of the benefits of the tablet form factor was lack of moving parts...

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Battery life

use_what_works_4_U 23rd Jun

I wonder what effect the p[latter based drive has on battery life? Anyone have an informed opinion?

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

snoop0x7b Updated - 23rd Jun

@macadam

Depends on whether the battery size is larger...

Hard disks definitely have higher power demands than flash memory. 7200RPM laptop drives use 2W on average according to Newegg. According to wikipedia SSDs use 1/2 to 1/3 of the power of a regular hard drive, so 1W to 2/3W...

So battery being equal, and processor being equal, the hard drive will reduce the battery life...So let's do the math:

Assume:
3400mAh battery (3.4 amp hours)
5V notebook hard drive (typical drive)
processor power is equal and thus a non-factor (it will subtract out)
Power distribution is 100%.
Hard drives use a considerable amount of power (about 10W for a notebook) to spin up to full speed when they are first started (but only for a few seconds. An Arm Cortex A8 @1.0ghz uses a maximum of 3W. The display also uses power, let's say about 1W.

2W notebook drive + 3W processor + 1W display
6W/5V = 1200ma
3600mA-h/1200mA = 3H

(.666W + 4) / 5V = 800mAH
3600mA-h/800mA = 4H

Conclusion:

Our hypothetical tablet with an SSD will last 33% longer than the one with the hard drive, assuming 100% CPU usage for the entirety.

Other considerations:

Hard disks require significant amounts of power to spin up somewhere in the neighborhood of 10W for a notebook drive for a few seconds. This means shutting down and starting up the tablet will cost more energy. SSDs also use less power when idle as they aren't doing anything. So in practice, SSD tablets are probably upwards of 33% better at full load. We also assumed 100% CPU utilization, which is in practice just not true... But that doesn't really matter because we were comparing hard drives

The reality is probably that archos will stick in a bigger battery to compensate, and that the tablet won't be used at 100% the whole time.

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Thanks

use_what_works_4_U 23rd Jun

@snoop0x7b
Basically that's what I thought the answer might generally be, but I'm not technically competent to do the comparisons. I appreciate the time for the reply.

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Very. Nicely. Done.

UrNotPayingAttention 23rd Jun

@snoop0x7b

+1

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

phoenix.psaltery@... 23rd Jun

The advantage I can see is up to ten times more storage than a 32GB iPad.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Bates_ 23rd Jun

@phoenix.psaltery@... What's the point? Everything is cloud based nowadays.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

snoop0x7b 23rd Jun

@Bates_ Enjoy streaming movies over your limited 5GB data plan... Data plans are limited so that's not really viable for movies.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Bates_ 23rd Jun

@snoop0x7b First of all I don't watch movies on my tablet, and secondly if I did, my T-MO MiFi data plan doesn't have overage fees if I happen to go over. Also: My Asus Transformer has a SD slot and with the dock has a USB drive, so yea that sort of solves my storage issue doesn't it?

Thanks for playing!

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@Bates_ ... I'm confused...

UrNotPayingAttention Updated - 23rd Jun

@Bates_

Up above you cite speed as being a drawback to having a spindle...

Yet, here, in regards to storage space (or lack thereof)... you mention the SD slot as saving grace. How fast do you think that SD slot's going to perform, exactly?

And, once again, unless you are talking about data greater than 32GB (which your tablet can't handle), you won't notice the speed difference between a spindle and flash.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

snoop0x7b 24th Jun

@Bates_ Then the hard drive tablet isn't for you... I watch movies on mine. And with AT&T's up and coming acquisition of T-Mobile you'd better believe you're going to be paying out the ass for data...

Plus I have some 200GB of movies on my desktop from DVDrips, and 30GB of music. It'd be nice to carry it all around without swapping SD cards and without having to carry around an external hard drive.

There are definitely downsides to the hard drive tablet, but I can see a real upside. If you don't, then don't buy it... I'd consider buying one.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

tpach Updated - 23rd Jun

That would not be the first to have a hdd. The Sahara slate comes with one and has been out since before 2004.

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That's not a bad idea

doodlius 23rd Jun

Put a buttload of storage on the thing so you don't have to count on a very fast cloud connection all the time. I don't know exactly what the specs are on the drives, but the best option would be a hybrid device, so you could load the OS from Flash storage (for speed) and just keep all the data on the spinning media (for volume). This would be great for watching movies on the road.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

TKR1 23rd Jun

Cloud is great....as long as you are home or anywhere near civilisation. What if you frequently travel away from these cloud friendly locations? I think we should wait and see the specs, as used in a tablet, before assumptions about noise, boot speed or power use are argued over.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

neilpost Updated - 24th Jun

Yawn, is this 2003 ?

I had a 1Gb IBM Microdrive in my Dell Axim X50v, when Flash Memory cost a fortune. It also worked in my Fuji FinePix S602Z

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The end of magnetic media?

jefferson@... 24th Jun

I wish Seagate would get with the times and start investing in silicon. The full common name of the material is "rare earth magnets". In other words, it isn't extremely common to find the materials needed to make the hard drives. In addition, some of those materials have to be imported from places like China. Whereas with chips, it just relies on plastic, a lot less metals and sand. In other words, solid state drives are far more efficient, environmentally friendly and with the current generation of drives, every bit as reliable.

@datrappert You should check out Intel's latest series of SSD's ... They are extremely reliable.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

Muttz 24th Jun

Archos released 7" tablets running Android 2.2 with 250 GB hard drives last fall. This isn't new.

http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_70it/hdmulti.html?country=us&lang=en

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

frizzllefry 24th Jun

I would also like a floppy disk and tape back-up installed to make the package complete. I think it's a great idea, because electro-mechanical parts certainly have a lower failure rate and consume less power than solid state devices. Hell, while we're at it, lets just add a physical keyboard to the thing.

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

TampaBri 25th Jun

@EVERYBODY - Thanks so much for all the argumentative back-and-forth on this. It's been a real hoot!

As for me, I think I'll just hide and watch where the technology goes, until the guy with the crystal ball shows up...

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RE: Seagate unveils 'world's first' tablets with hard drives

danbi 26th Jun

There will be tablet-like devices with internal spinning magnetic drives, as well as true tablet devices with solid state storage devices.

The performance characteristics of HDDs are just not match for tablets, consider this:

- HDDs draw lots of power to spin up;
- HDDs take eons to stop/start, even from 'sleep' modes.
- HDDs heads move slow. If you want faster moving heads, you spend s LOT more power. Even the fastest HDD has orders of magnitude slower (takes longer to access data) than SSD.
- It is true, that internal HDDs have faster transfer rates than SD cards or external USB attached HDDs, or even wireless, but the slowest SDD will likely be 10 MB/sec, the typical USB 2.0 transfer rate would be 20-30 MB/sec and wireless.. well, much faster. So what you need faster transfer speeds for? What is the highest bitrate movie you can display on an tablet screen? And so on...
- HDDs have practically reached the end of their development cycle. What you can see from HDDs from now on is decrease in power consumption, increase of capacity, but in no way impropwements in access times etc. At the same time, there is a lot more development in SDDs and prices go down all the time. At some points, SSDs will be cheaper than HDDs and at that times everyone will forget about HDDs for storage, as people have already forgotten 8", 5.25" FDDs, 5.25" HDDs (what a surprise), CDs, DVD-RAMs etc.
- if your tablet has flash card slot, you could fit a lot more movies in a pile of flash cards, that will take less volume and weight less than the same capacity HDD. And, you will benefit from having to navigate in less crowded filesystem and much less power consumption.
- HD encryption is not trivial and is not obvious that tablets are going to support it. It really does not matter what you need to encrypt, HDD or SDD -- the technology is the same and encryption happens on the HDD controller chips, not on the HDD magnetic plates anyway.
- Most SSD's used in tablets do not come in the form factor of an 'drive'. Instead these are just FLASH chips soldered on the device's logic board -- with typical (hard) drives you need a host side controller and a drive side controller. With embedded flash you just skip those, which means less power consumption and better performance.

I better stop here happy