Laptop Thoughts: Seagate Delivers Unmatched Price-Performance Storage For World's First Tablet's Featuring Hard Drives

"Seagate (NASDAQ: STX) is delivering hard disk drive storage for the world's first handheld tablet computers with hard drives. The ARCHOS G9 8- and 10-inch tablets, announced today in Paris, feature the Seagate Momentus® Thin hard drive, a speedy notebook drive with a super-slim 7mm profile. The performance and capacity of the Momentus Thin drive are the perfect complement for the cutting-edge speed of the ARCHOS G9 family of tablets that features the industry's fastest dual-core 1.5 GHz processor and, on the strength of the Momentus Thin drive, gives users 250GB of capacity, eight times more than a standard 32GB tablet but at the same cost, making the ARCHOS G9 one of the tablet industry's best cost-performance values."

A hard drive that's only 7mm thin? Now that's impressive. 250 GB of storage on a tablet really changes the game when it comes to storage; if you're a movie, photo or music enthusiast, being able to carry all your media content on your tablet would be fantastic. Myself, I'd need 60 GB for all my photos (with some videos thrown in the mix), and another 99 GB to carry all my music. It will be 2016 until I'm able to get anywhere near that with Flash storage. On the flip side, even with as good as hard drives have become with shock tolerance, I'd feel like I'd have to treat the tablet in a more gentle fashion knowing that it had a spinning hard drive in it. It's a trade off to be sure. These two Archos tablets sound pretty interesting though - an 8 inch tablet with a dual-core 1.5 Ghz CPU for $279? Hmm. The remainder of the press release is after the break.

"ARCHOS 80 G9, the 8-inch product, and ARCHOS 101 G9, the 10-inch model, are scheduled to be available in late September. Estimated MSRPs for the ARCHOS 80 G9 and ARCHOS 101 GB tablets are $279 and $349, respectively, compared to competitive tablets starting at $499. More information on the ARCHOS tablets is available at www.archos.com.

"Seagate continues to break new ground in the development of products and technologies that matter most to customers by delivering the Momentus® Thin drive for these powerful ARCHOS tablets," said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. "The Momentus® Thin drive gives tablet buyers a compelling option, providing great storage capacity and performance that dovetail with the processing power of the new ARCHOS products for great Android and multimedia experiences."

The Seagate Momentus Thin hard drive is ideal for tablet computers and other ultra-portables, entry-level to high-performance laptop PCs, and slim consumer electronics devices. The world's first 2.5-inch hard drive with a 7mm profile features:

Seagate SmartAlignTM technology to smooth the transition to 4K sectors without the need for software utilities 320GB, 250GB and 160GB capacities 7200RPM and 5400RPM spin speeds with 16MB of cache Optional: Government-grade encryption to protect computer data where it lives - on the hard drive - for powerful data security. (The Momentus Thin drive is FIPS 140-2 certified, delivering government-grade encryption, and conforms to the Trusted Computing Group Opal specification, developed to enable the ecosystem for self-encrypting drives and increase their adoption.)

In another move into the tablet computing market, Seagate last month announced the GoFlex SatelliteTM mobile wireless storage device, the first battery-powered external hard drive to wirelessly extend the storage capacity of any Wi-Fi enabled mobile device including tablets. With 500GB and Wi-Fi access over 802.11 b/g/n and a rechargeable battery, the GoFlex Satellite device enables users of tablets and other ultra-portables to carry an entire library of video, music, pictures and documents."