Seagate looks to bring back storage to the newest tech trend with an old school approach. Many of todays tablets are limited to 32GB (sometimes 64GB) of space due to the use of solid state memory. To break this chain, Seagate introduces their new Momentus Thin Drive for the tablet market segment.

The difference between Seagate Momentus Thin and other 2.5″ drives is it stands a mere 7 mm tall instead of the standard 9.8 mm you find in similar drives. This is a very large achievement to cut what most would consider a small amount. While the difference in the physical size may not be impressive, providing up to 320 GB of storage space is a full 10 fold improvement. The Momentus Thin will still have the industry standard speeds of 5400 RPMs and 7200 RPMs, boast a 16 MB cache, come with government grade encryption options, and should prove capable of competing in speed with some of the entry level SSDs used in similar devices.

This Seagate Momentus Thin will make its first world wide appearance as the primary storage of the Archos 80 G9 and Archos 101 G9 in September of this year. The expected MSRP will be $279 and $349 respectively. In addition to such a small device having a comparatively enormous among of space, the Archos G9s will feature a 1.5 Ghz Dual core processor.

I expect this new drive to help people who want to completely replace their laptops with a small tablet by allowing them to keep the storage you would get from a laptop. On the same note, people who tend to drop tablets more often due to the style of interaction (holding with one hand on one side and poking the device’s touch screen) may want to consider the Archos G9 SSD options.

Me personally being someone who likes to have something to watch while I travel, this is great. HD digital copies of Blu-ray movies you buy these days, even when coded for a smaller screen, are still several gigabytes in size. It would be nice to finally have a decent selection to pick from instead of guessing beforehand what I will be in the mood to watch.

[hide-this-part morelink= “Full Press Release”]

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.

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 SmartAlign™ 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 Satellite™ 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.

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