Samsung announced that they have finished developing their first PMD drives. With a form factor of 2.5", the hard drives will be used mainly in notebooks and will have capacities ranging from 80GBs to 160GB. The new "M80" series will feature both PATA and SATA drives in order to have a higher flexibility when it comes to platform integration.

The hard drives include a completely new technology called "free-fall" incorporated in a sensor which monitors acceleration of the hard drive in order to react more quickly in case the laptop falls from a distance that could harm the drive. In case such an event is in progress, the sensor "parks" the drive's head and then turns it off, limiting the loss of data and in some cases, the damage taken by the drive itself.

By switching to PMR, Samsung has joined with the other manufacturers who are already shipping PMR drives. As a reminder, Toshiba sells 200GB PMR 2.5" models while Seagate uses the technology in its desktop drives, producing 3.5" 750GB models. As for Hitachi, they have already announced a PMR version of their mobile hard drives that will have a storage capacity of 250GB. Not bad for a new technology such as PMR. In a year or so, PMR hard drives will probably dominate the sales due to their larger capacities compared to conventional storage methods.