Researchers Working on HDDs Slim Enough For Tablets

[eddieroolz]

A HDD would give us a lot more capacity for same or less price, but there's a huge problem.

Heat, wear/tear and the susceptibility to shock. There's a reason why we use flash storage in many of these applications.

 

[martel80]

What about providing a microSD slot on each tablet instead? Then you may buy and swap between as many cards as you want. Plus they're smaller, more durable, they consume less juice and are probably going to be cheaper per GB than a miniature HDD.

 

[amk-aka-Phantom]

What about providing a microSD slot on each tablet instead? Then you may buy and swap between as many cards as you want. Plus they're smaller, more durable, they consume less juice and are probably going to be cheaper per GB than a miniature HDD.

Haha, but then you can't charge $100 for extra 16GB capacity!

 

[back_by_demand]

Hard Drives were good and they are the foundation that the 20th century was built on
...
But so were steam trains, get with the 21st century and stop trying to jump on the tablet bandwagon
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Hard drive manufacturers need to concentrate on their two redeming features over SSD which are capacity and cost per gigabyte. Eventually the world will move entirely to SSD and the HDD manufacturers have plenty of time to branch into the market, diversify and push marketing. Maybe in 10 years time the worlds number 1 SSD supplier will be Seagate or Western Digital but until that time they should focus on giving us 10Tb drives and stop trying to put drives into devices that are not forgiving of mechanical moving parts.

 

[danwat1234]

From article; "DSI said that it will be demonstrating a 5 mm drive sometime in the future, but did not mention an exact time."

Uh, 5mm thick 1-platter 1.8" hard drives have been out for a long time, although not more than 5400RPM or maybe 4200RPM! I believe the regular Apple Ipods have such a drive in it.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]phasmantis[/nom]Something about spinning disks on a platter and lots of maneuverability doesn't seem to go together... oh yeah, the maneuverability. Sorry, but there should be NOTHING in a tablet besides some sort of flash memory. Last thing I want is to feel my HDD vibrate and hear it click in the palm of my hands...[/citation]

Laptop hard drive can handle 300Gees of operating shock, so if the manufacture design a bit of cushion material for the drive, it'd be difficult to damage it without damaging the tablet too.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]eddieroolz[/nom]A HDD would give us a lot more capacity for same or less price, but there's a huge problem.Heat, wear/tear and the susceptibility to shock. There's a reason why we use flash storage in many of these applications.[/citation]
Perhaps software in the tablet will use aggressive caching with the hard drive; suck data from the drive into a small SSD and then spin it down, or use a hybrid hard drive that does the same thing. The regular Apple Ipods for example, I believe the hard drive will read out the mp3 you are playing to the Ipod, and then the drive immediately spins down, and spins up for a few seconds to cache a new song every few minutes.