What type of hard drive do tablets have?

Tablets are essentially just smartphones scaled up in size, with a few changes of course. But the NAND Flash in our phones are the same. This link is for a Galaxy Tab and in step 13 there's a photo of the motherboard (front side) with the storage memory chip highlighted in red:
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Tab+Teardown/4103

 

Actually, it's more like the opposite. SSDs are all microchip storage with no moving parts. Exact same thing with flash memory, jump drives, SD cards...

 

In some cheap devices you can find a SD card glued to a connector and used as internal memory.

 

SSDs, flash drives, sd cards and a phone's internal storage are all solid state storage. The difference with an SSD is mainly in the storage controller. That's why The Chief says it's the other way round: an SSD is a type of semiconductor storage device, but other semiconductor storage devices are not SSDs.

 

The first reply answered that one. It's *exactly* like a phone, a NAND chip soldered to the board (but not technically a SSD, which has a specific meaning).

 

Absolutely. No moving parts. No Android tablet I've ever heard of uses an actual HDD (they'd be a bad choice for a tablet: too bulky, too fragile, use too much power).

 

correct that the "solid" part. In the old days a radio would have tubes inside that had moving parts. "Solid State" electronics meant no moving parts. A hard drive is spinning like a record, but a SSD "solid state drive" has no moving parts.

 

No tablet maker with any sanity would put a spinning hard drive in a tablet. The power consumption factor alone rules it out. Let alone physical size and speed factors.

Supposedly, some tablets can be upgraded with better storage from an SD slot externally, with a few having their boot drive be an m.2 interfaced ssd. That would be a treat for speed and capacity.