Seagate offers 500GB Ultra Mobile hard drive

[edap]

If you’ve ever considered an Android tablet, I'm sure one of the major factors in making your upcoming purchase is whether or not to go for a tablet that has more internal storage. Even though a good majority of Android tablets support microSD cards, you’re only able to use up to 64GB cards, leaving those who need some serious storage space left with not much choice. Seagate is looking to change this with its newly-announced Ultra Mobile hard drive.
Seagate’s Ultra Mobile offers a 500GB drive which uses the company’s 5mm design and 8GB of flash cache inside a more durable enclosure along with a firmware that helps improve the device’s ability to handle shocks and controls energy consumption.
Ultra Mobile also comes with a Dynamic Data Driver which Seagate says “intelligently manages the data between the devices’ on-board flash and the HDD.” Just how intelligently its driver is able to manage the data is yet to be seen, but it’s certainly an interesting thing to include.
As of now, Seagate has yet to make any announcements to its Ultra Mobile’s pricing or availability. For now, if you’re an Android tablet owner who has been suffering from not being able to get the hard drive space you need, your suffering will soon come to an end.
Source: ubergizmo.com

 

[vampirefo.]

I don't see that much storage as a good thing. I guess that's just me.

 

[edap]

It seems to me this might be useful for the bloated Windows 8 installs on the Surface Pro and probably not much else.
Regardless of what's available, I'm sure regular tablet manufactures are just going to keep shoving in the cheapest 16GB flash chip that they can find and call it a day.

 

[DonSchaeffer]

If you have to carry a hard drive around with you wherever you go, you may as well use a PC.

 

[edap]

Tablets all currently use SSDs, or solid state drives. These are small and fast, and can take the bumps and bangs that tablets are regularly exposed to -- but they are more expensive per gigabyte than traditional spinning hard drives and they generally require more power.
Seagate thinks its newly-announced hard drive would provide the best of both worlds. It would give tablet users access to much more storage capacity for their money, while its Dynamic Data Driver software would protect the spinning disk from being damaged by motion.