We've seen this lament on more than a few reviews: 16 gigabytes isn't enough storage for a mobile device anymore. Prolific hard drive vendor Seagate would like to offer an alternative to the sometimes stingy flash storage standard. Even 2.5-inch laptop drives are generally too big and power-hungry for tablets, but Seagate's new Ultra Mobile HDD crams up to 500GB of storage into a module just 5mm thin.

In addition to the thin design that could potentially fit in almost any tablet casing, the hard drive weighs only 3.3 ounces and uses as little as .14 watts of power. Of course hard drives can't match the speed of flash storage, so Seagate is also throwing in its proprietary Dynamic Data Driver with the OEM package. An "intelligent caching system" will reportedly allow hardware to use up to 64GB of shared storage at any given time without sacrificing speed or power consumption. Maybe this flexible cache is the reason that Seagate didn't use the even smaller 1.8" HDD standard. The dynamic driver also includes drop detection for some extra data security when your tablet takes a tumble.

This isn't the first integrated hard drive we've seen on Android - that honor goes to the the Archos G9 series (Seagate also provided the OEM hard drives for those models). That design decision didn't really catch on, but then Archos has always catered more to the budget and media-happy crowds. It will be interesting to see if any of the larger manufacturers take Seagate's offer and start building Android tablets with storage that could rival laptops.