Hard drive maker Seagate has announced the world’s first Ultra Mobile HDD aimed at tablets. The Ultra Mobile HDD measures just 5 mm in thickness and offers 500 GB of storage, which can be a big boon for devices such as 7 inch and 10 inch tablets, which mostly suffer due to lower Internal Memory and higher cost of 64 GB and 128 GB memory cards.
The Ultra Mobile HDD as the company claims consumes the same amount of energy as a 64 GB flash drive and does not put any additional load on the device. The added advantage however comes in the form of faster data access times and a bigger, never seen before capacity of 500 GB, which will go a long way in helping users save all their data on their personal devices and not shuffle memory cards.
The price of the drive has not yet been announced but is expected to be almost the same as a 64 GB memory module, which is currently being used on devices such as Apple iPad.
“Coupling an ultra-thin, high-capacity HDD with software designed to optimize integration into tablets at a value-added price has allowed us to deliver a truly ground-breaking solution, enabling our partners to reimagine the mobile device,” said Steve Luczo, president, chief executive officer and chairman, Seagate.
Although the new drive has no direct utility, if manufacturers start adopting it in mobile devices users will benefit from the higher capacity storage on these devices.