Samsung Offers New 500GB 2.5-Inch Rugged HDDs

If you have been looking to upgrade your laptop's storage solution but haven't yet found a suitable replacement, maybe it's time to check out Samsung's latest offering. A world leader in consumer electronics and IT products, the company has just announced its latest 500GB, 2.5-inch hard drive, designed to provide users with a reliable storage solution, even when used in harsh working environments. According to the company, the new Spinpoint M7 500GB is built using 250GB platters and is featured with a rugged base and cover design, which is meant to provide better security for the user's digital content.

“Our customers have been requesting hard drives with higher density, lower power and greater reliability for their mobile applications,” said C.H. Lee, vice president, Storage sales and marketing, Samsung Electronics. “The Spinpoint M7 answers these needs with a high-speed operating shock specification and extraordinary drive capacity for storing large data files, music, photos and videos.”

Samsung's new Spinpoint M7 series is available in capacities of 250-, 320-, 400- and 500GB. In addition to a rugged exterior, the hard disk drives make use of a new controller that is said to enable power consumption reduction of up to 25 percent in seek mode, over conventional 2.5-inch drives. According to internal testing, the drives demonstrated an 18% improvement in overall performance in PC Mark tests.

As far as technical specifications go, the new Spinpoint M7-series hard drives are designed to be lightweight and durable, featuring a 5400RPM spindle speed, a buffer level of 8MB, native command queuing (NCQ) and a fast SATA 3Gb/s connection interface. With a maximum storage capacity of 500GB, users can store approximately 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high-definition video images.

According to Samsung, the new Spinpoint M7 series is currently shipping to major OEMs. Unfortunately, the company hasn't specified any details regarding the pricing of its latest drives.