Seagate today announced a hard disk drive (HDD) with a capacity of 500 GB for usage in mobile devices. The company targets specifically manufacturers of Android tablets with the height of only 5 millimeter. The new HDD has the name Ultra Mobile and Seagate wants it to become an alternative to the flash-memory currently used in mobile devices like tablets.
The HDD should make it possible for tablet manufacturers to dramatically increase the storage capacity, currently most tablets have a maximum of 64 GB of internal memory. Seagate claims that a mobile device using 8GB of flash, the Ultra Mobile HDD and their Dynamic Data Driver software have the power consumption equal to that of a 64GB tablet and the performance equal to that of a 16GB tablet, while costing less than either.
The Dynamic Data Driver software provides drive protection through the use of motion sensor and thermal monitoring algorithms to control drive access and avoid usage conditions that might harm it. Seagate claims that the drive is so well insulated that in many cases a dropped device’s screen would break before its hard disk drive.
Seagate also makes available a Mobile Enablement Kit which includes the Ultra Mobile HDD, Dynamic Data Driver software, and an optional customized reference design which allows tablet manufacturers to easily integrate the HDD. The kit is currently designed to only support Android.
It's unclear if there are any manufacturers that will add the drive to their device. The HDD isn't exactly new, previously the 500 GB, 5 mm thin HDD was available for use in laptops. Seagate claims that the Ultra Mobile is a variant of this drive that's optimized for use in tablets. The 5400 RPM HDD has 16 MB cache, connects to the device using the SATA-3 interface and consumes about 1.7 Watts.
Usage of HDDs in mobile devices isn't common. Years ago MP3 players with HDDs were popular but flash memory based devices rapidly replaced them.
Seagate also announced Rescue and Replace, a service that helps users to retrieve lost data or replace a defect HDD. Subscription for the service are available in plans of two, three or fout years, the two year plan has a price of $29.99. The plans offer coverage for nearly any brand of internal or external hard disk drive or solid-state drive.
It covers data recovery services for data that may have been lost due to physical damage, corruption or accidental deletion. Rescue and Replace will be the first to be offered on a global scale following launches in Canada and Europe later this year and throughout the Asia Pacific region in mid-2014.
