UbuTab: An Ubuntu Tablet With A Terabyte Hard Drive

[phoronix]

Phoronix: UbuTab: An Ubuntu Tablet With A Terabyte Hard Drive

Separate from the Ubuntu Tablet supposed to come later this month, another crowd-funded Ubuntu Tablet has launched. Unlike most tablets out there, this new third-party Ubuntu Tablet ships with a hard drive to offer more storage capacity...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg1Mjc

[Nille]

Sounds interesting if they replace the HDD with a cheap 128GB or 265GB SSD (e.g. MSA370) because its a ARM SoC that doesn't need a 500MB/s SSD.

[Redi44]

A9? lol nope

[sebastianlacuesta]

A hard drive for a tablet???

Yeah, and forget about the problems with movement and vibrations in hard drives.

[e8hffff]

Detailed hardware specification:

10.1" IPS Screen with 1920x1200 resolution (supports up to 10 points at once)

ARM Cortex-A9 Quad-Core CPU @ 1.6GHz

Mali400MP4 Quad-Core GPU - Supports Open GL ES 2.0

2GB RAM

1TB internal storage (2.5" Hard Drive. 5400RPM)

802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0

6 Hours battery life (11,000mAh)

5MP Camera (rear only)

16GB Flash Storage

Ports:

Micro-USB

Micro-HDMI

Micro-SD (32GB Maximum)

Headphone (3.5mm)

Dimensions:

256mm x 162mm x 14mm
Weight: 650g ~ 1.4Lbs

Many old specs.

[MichaelTunnell]

This is a pointless tablet...and is so flawed there is no reason to even link people to it.

[madjr]

Yeah, and forget about the problems with movement and vibrations in hard drives.

Seems it also has 16gb flash and they are using slimmer drives, not normal laptop ones, so they may be made to fair even more than the vibration laptops withstand.

The flash is probably for the OS , core apps and most of the daily processes. And don't want to use the HDD for some reason , there is also a micro SD slot

For the price the specs look more than decent, beats Jolla tablet in a number of areas imo

[andyprough]

Yeah, and forget about the problems with movement and vibrations in hard drives.

We've had spinning hard drives in all kinds of mobile devices for decades now - laptops, tablet PCs, iPods, netbooks, even some Palm Pilots. Archos has built Android tablets with spinning hard drives since 2010.

[Luke]

Ipods had hard drives back in 2001, surely portable HDD's can hold up today

Yeah, and forget about the problems with movement and vibrations in hard drives.

Ipods had hard drives in the old days, they were made from just a few standard off the shelf parts from what I heard. Big problem with those wasn't hard drive failures, it was a semi non-replaceable battery. You had to source the replacement battery directly and disassemble the device, Crapple said you were supposed to buy a new iPod instead of a new battery.

I suspect hard drives today would last just fine, I've got one of these 2 1/2" drives in a netbook that spends a lot of time in a backpack riding on the back of a bike, and it shows no errors or issues. The one drive of this type I had die was killed by being knocked from a desk onto the iron base of a mike stand while running and while clad only in an aluminum external HDD mount with no rubber armor. Even that didn't kill it all the way dead, it just made multiple bad spots that could be bypassed by partitioning around them. I've still got about 40GB of usable space on that drive in the same carrier, though I would only use it for emergency overflow storage of files to be moved somewhere and replaceable from the main machine if anything happened.

[e8hffff]

I wish them luck. The only thing is I think they are cutting the project short but the lacking SoC, small camera resolution and no 4G/LTE. There's also no need for the harddrive. You simply need a 128GB or 256GB SDD and the 4G/LTE will get you past any other storage problems with the ability to move stuff to a personal cloud or where ever.