14 DAY TRIAL // Because of how thin they are, and how unfriendly constant jostling can be to the internal parts of HDDs, media tablets use NAND Flash memory chip exclusively, usually through special-purpose, embedded chips instead of full-on SSDs.
Only some professional slates and industrial devices in need of large capacities use hard drive units, since they don't need to be as thin and light.
Western Digital wants to change that though, which is why it has created not just an SSHD but also a hard drive with a thickness of 5 mm and 500 GB capacity.
5 mm-thick drives were revealed before, but this is the first time one is made precisely for tablets.
In fact, Western Digital will bring a tablet equipped with it at the 2013 edition of the Computex trade show.
Said show will take place in Taipei, Taiwan next week, between June 4 and June 8, as we've previously noted on multiple occasions.
Oddly enough, the drive will exhibit the 2.5-inch form factor rather than the smaller 1.8-inch one.
Then again, 1.8-inch units are very rare, and expensive, not to mention that they don't have that much platter area in which to shove 500 GB.
The size will pose a problem, because it will eat into the space normally reserved for batteries. It might force a compromise that will result in a shorter battery life.
Then again, that doesn't mean that everyone will shy away from the idea of tablet HDDs. After all, while it might not necessarily fit inside the tablet, slates nowadays often ship with keyboard docks. Inserting the HDD in that dock instead of the tablet's main body could turn out to be a better compromise than the battery one.
In addition to the 5 mm tablet 2.5-inch HDD, Western Digital will bring a 5 mm SSHD (or more than one) and 7 mm drives with two platters (high-capacity storage for ultrabooks, cloud data centers, etc.).