Seagate releases ultra-thin Momentus 2.5-inch disk drives for tablets

STORAGE VENDOR Seagate has lifted the lid on its Momentus Thin hard drives aimed at tablets.

Gadget maker Archos was the first to include Seagate's Momentus Thin hard drives in its G9 series of tablets, however the firm didn't go into much detail on the storage itself. Now Seagate has officially launched the Momentus Thin series of drives which have a 7mm profile, considerably lower than the firm's standard 2.5in drives that have a profile of 9.5mm.

Seagate will make three Momentus Thin capacities available with 160GB, 250GB and 320GB in both 5,400RPM and 7,200RPM. All of the Momentus Thin drives will have a 16MB cache and there is the option of a hardware based encryption module.

Most of the tablets on the market today use flash based storage and while hard drives might not provide the same performance, they are considerably cheaper. It could be argued that with so much content located on the internet, it is more likely that the internet connection will be the source of delays rather than the storage medium.

There's no doubt that flash based storage can produce thinner and more responsive devices, however if tablet makers use some flash memory as a cache, then traditional platter hard drives could well find a following among cheaper tablets. µ