Any chance of a disc drive in future android tablet?
- Thread starter mattg3
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EthelAardvaark
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- Jan 23, 2012
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My new toy quite happily reads my 1tb USB Samsung portable disk (usb powered). For me it's better being removable as I only need it occasionally. It does need the docking station to be in place though.
ETA.
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Sent from my transformer prime.
ETA.
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Sent from my transformer prime.
Androidfonefan
Senior Member
- Jan 14, 2012
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Using a true disk drive on a tablet could be disastrous to the system. SolidStat drives have no moving parts.. Disk drives have platters and read write arms. If you were carrying your tablet from one room to another or dropped it or other sudden movements like that could cause the read write heads to contact the platters on the drive and well....... The tablet would have to be on but were that to happen all information on the the drive including boot sectors partitions etc would be lost and the drive itself could be made useless from such a catosrofic action.
All this I think is why you don't see disk drives on tablets.
Sent from my VTAB1008 using Android Tablet Forum
All this I think is why you don't see disk drives on tablets.
Sent from my VTAB1008 using Android Tablet Forum
EthelAardvaark
Member
- Jan 23, 2012
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Many laptops now have drop- protection ( called freefall on my works dell i think) so a tablet could too quite easily.
But spinning disks also tend to use much more power, something to be avoided on a tablet.
ETA.
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Sent from my transformer prime.
But spinning disks also tend to use much more power, something to be avoided on a tablet.
ETA.
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Sent from my transformer prime.
- Aug 6, 2010
- 1,463
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My old Archos 5/500 would get about 10 hours continuous Music and 6 hours Movies when new. About two years later, it is about 5 hours music and 2 hours movies. What I think it makes a difference is a "hidden" feature, It caches up to 20 minutes and then spins down the drive. Thus it saves on the drain. I think the A70/250 and A80/250 have same cache logic. But if you are using something that continuously spins up the drive, it does drain faster. Wish I could easily replace the battery. but, it is both a pain and hard to get. Send it to Archos for replacement, you might as well buy a new Tablet for the replacement battery. There were/are Battery extenders from the Factory, but those have not been in production for a year. Ah, well
jgumphress
Senior Member
- Sep 6, 2011
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Why would you want a hard drive anyway? Might as well just add in a 5 1/4 floppy too. With the drop in price of flash memory and the speed they work I would take flash memory any day over a hard drive.
- Jan 6, 2011
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I have to agree with this. Why would you want to added a spinning disk drive to a tablet? That is certainly a step backwards in tablet technology and has no real benefit specific to tablets. The only benefit I can think of would be to have more cheap storage on board but as mentioned you can already attach external drives and also backup/transfer wirelessly or via usb and swap SD cards (on many tablets) to manage storage needs. The point of a tablet isn't to have terabytes of on board storage.
Tanzanite
Senior Member
- Jan 14, 2012
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I have to admit that I used to connect a USB Hard Disk to my Tablet as I have a couple of TB music and films, which is a bit difficult to fit on Micro SD cards. This is history now for reasons that are mentioned above. Instead I use Skifta to stream from my computer to the tablet. It works like a dream on my WiFi at home and the office (Just tested it the office of course
) It also allows you to stream when you are away from you home network so you basically have access to all your media files from anywhere in the world.
- Aug 6, 2010
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For those of us who grew up using a PMP with a HD internally and a really big music library which you have ripped from CD. It is nice to have your choice of any song or playlist you want.
but, if you grew up when Spotify, Pandora and even cloud storage offerings, it loses its appeal. A full featured Tablet which you can also use as a removable drive or similar, it made sense.
I use the phrase "grew up" metaphorically. The PMP/IPod period is not that long ago. Nor was it that long ago, something like Pandora or Spotify was just a dream.
Today, I would be thrilled with large capacity Tablet. Of course, this is coming from someone who has a Asus TF-101/32 with a 32Gb MicroSD in the tablet and a 32 Gb SD card in the KB dock. I like lots a stuff available.
but, if you grew up when Spotify, Pandora and even cloud storage offerings, it loses its appeal. A full featured Tablet which you can also use as a removable drive or similar, it made sense.
I use the phrase "grew up" metaphorically. The PMP/IPod period is not that long ago. Nor was it that long ago, something like Pandora or Spotify was just a dream.
Today, I would be thrilled with large capacity Tablet. Of course, this is coming from someone who has a Asus TF-101/32 with a 32Gb MicroSD in the tablet and a 32 Gb SD card in the KB dock. I like lots a stuff available.
Androidfonefan
Senior Member
- Jan 14, 2012
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Thats true but from my understanding of the drop protection that only works if the drive is parked. ie not spinning. If the tablet is in use and dropped while the drive is in motion you stand a huge loss.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=drop protection hard drives&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CFEQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.iomega.com%2Fresources%2Fwhitepapers%2Fhd-drop-guard.pdf&ei=HIA6T7SdG8OA2wWYxfW9Cg&usg=AFQjCNE1ZfzM52NpiSd4dz9xzGuUcJOdDA&cad=rja
After reading I see what you are saying, and though is seems that some drives are capable of taking a fall it still can be more damaging to a disk drive than a SSD. Also the power usage point made by another member here.
While it may be perfectly safe to use a disk drive in a tablet, I would be hesitant to buy one myself.
In time SSDs of much larger sizes will come down in price and we will see larger drives in these devices.
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