CES 2008: Forget Hitachi, Samsung's 500GB 2.5-Inch Drive Has Arrived

Samsung has announced their new line of 2.5-inch form factor notebook HDD to store 500 GB of data. The announcement comes only three days later after Hitachi unveiled industry's first 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive.

At the moment, the largest notebook hard-disk drive is a 320 GB model manufactured by Western Digital. Samsung may have been defeated in the "who's first" competition, but their model fully complies with the notebook standard.

I have told you in a previous article that Hitachi's 500GB 2.5-inch drive is not only hard to get, but it's also difficult to add to your laptop, as it features a non-standard, 12.5 mm thickness. Samsung's drive fixes the glitch and comes in a true 2.5-inch form factor (it is only 9.5 mm thick).

"We continue to raise the bar for high capacity 500 GB 2.5" hard drives," said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. "Our Spinpoint M6 500 GB extends the data storage capacity for notebooks and readily fits within the tens of millions of notebooks that ship every quarter with no modification to the notebook chassis, giving users more storage power than ever before."

The Spinpoint M6 500 GB is made of three 166 GB platters in a 2.5" hard disk drive frame. The disk features a 5400 rpm spindle speed, a 8 MB cache, and 3 Gbps SATA-II interface. It also includes Samsung's patented protection technology, made comprised of a free fall sensor and a rotational vibration sensor.

The disk can function at optimal parameters even in severe temperature environments, thanks to the Flying on Demand head technology that improves recording stability over changing temperature ranges. The Spinpoint M6 can store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video content.

Samsung's new achievement will be displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show that has just started. The manufacturer has announced that the drive will become available until the end of March, but there is no word on pricing yet.

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