Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announced today the mass production of the world’s highest capacity hard drive for laptops – the new Spinpoint M6. It features a stunning 500GB priced at $299 MSRP.

The Spinpoint M6 fits the industry’s standard 9.5mm height dimension and is armed with a massive 500GB capacity consisting of three 167GB platters, notebook PC manufacturers can integrate the Spinpoint M6 into the tens of millions of notebook PCs that ship every quarter as well as slim form factor PCs and high density mobile applications.

The Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive features Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology, a 5400rpm spindle speed, a 8MB cache, and 3.0Gbps SATA interface with a Free-Fall-Sensor available as an optional feature.

"The Spinpoint M6 is ideal for notebook power users who require vast amounts of storage space for their data, video and music files," said Hubbert Smith, Samsung Semiconductor’s director of storage.

(Full article ‘Half-TB Mobile HDD from Samsung in Mass Production’)

Samsung Electronics is the first hard drive manufacturer to ship a 500GB 2.5-inch drive. Samsung announced its drive was shipping in volume to OEMs and PC makers today. As you probably know, Hitachi GST and Fujitsu have also announced their upcoming new solutions already. Hitachi’s drive was supposed to ship in February, but is now expected to ship later this month. Fujitsu says its drive will ship in May.

However, both Hitachi and Fujitsu are taking a different approach to 500GB than Samsung. All three drive makers use three disk platters, but Hitachi and Fujitsu reach 500GB by expanding the height of the drive from 9.5mm – the common standard for most notebooks – to 12.5mm, a height that’s increasingly accommodated on larger, desktop-replacement laptop designs, but not necessarily on more general-use laptops.

(Full article ‘Samsung Ships Half-Terabyte Mobile Hard Drive’)

We took a look at three new 160 GB 2.5″ notebook hard drives in April, and reviewed the 250 GB Scorpio drive by Western Digital in early June. With the release of Fujitsu’s new 160 GB high-performance 2.5″ drive and Samsung now offering a 250 GB model, the enthusiast space offers two choices for high-end users: you can either get a 7,200 RPM drive at a maximum capacity of 160 GB, or get as much as 250 GB storage capacity with 5,400 RPM drive performance. First 200 GB notebook Hitachi drives at 7,200 RPM have been around for several weeks, but we did not receive the samples before completion of this article. All new hard drive models are based on perpendicular magnetic recording technology (PMR), which was been the key to recent increases in capacities.
(Full article ‘Enthusiast 2.5″ HDDs: Speed or Capacity?’)