However, the new drive will be significantly slower when writing to the older 100MB disks -- because of the head design changes needed to increase per-disk capacity.
Pulling out the 15k RPM card this late in the game would usually be frowned upon, but in the case of NHK, its latest development to spin at 15, 000 revolutions per minute has nothing to do with a hard disk drive.
Due to the lower cost per GB of a 2.5-inch hard disk drive, the Archos tablets will offer 250 GB of storage for about the same price as 32 GB of flash memory on a current generation tablet computer.
The biggest threat to the spinning disk is the flash memory, which has many advantages over the spinning disk but is ten times the price on a per-megabyte basis.