Samsung Beats Hitachi GST With 500GB Notebook HDD Only 9.5mm Thick

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announces the development of its
new Spinpoint M6 500GB, the world’s first
500GB 2.5” hard drive that fits in the industry’s
standard 9.5mm height dimension.

Armed with 500GB capacity, the
Spinpoint M6 is designed to meet the growing storage needs of today’s
notebook computers as well as slim form factor PCs, blade servers and
high density mobile applications.

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

Samsung’s new Spinpoint M6 500GB consists of
three 166GB platters in a 2.5” hard disk
drive frame measuring just 9.5mm in height. Mainstream notebook PCs can
now support capacity of up to one terabyte by installing two Spinpoint
M6 500GB drives.

The Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive features a 5400rpm spindle speed, a
8MB cache, and 3.0Gbps SATA interface with a free fall sensor and a
rotational vibration sensor available as optional features.
Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology enables the 500GB drive to
store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of
high definition video images. The drive also features Samsung’s
Flying on Demand head technology that improves recording stability over
changing temperature ranges.

Samsung’s Spinpoint M6 500GB is expected to
be available in March 2008.

Samsung Electronics Co.

Comments

Samsung was a follower in hard disk drive technology. Since around two years, it's the contrary. At CES, the company has taken the habit to launch incredible HDDs that prove it.

In 3.5-inch form factor, it's the only company with a one-terabyte drive with three platters only.

Here the Korean company is launching a new 2.5-inch unit with a record capacity of 500GB in a smaller volume that the recently announced Hitachi GST Travelstar 5K500. Up to now, all the 9.5mm notebook units could only contain a maximum of two platters and four heads. Samsung did really a great job to put three disks and six heads in the same box. We think that 3.5-inch HDDs will be progressively completely replaced by 2.5-inch form factors. Their only disadvantage today is their capacity. But put two 2.5-inch mechanisms with the same controller in one box and you can now get one terabyte in about the same volume.

If you look an another today's Samsung's announcement, you will also be surprised by its new 1.8-inch HDD at 160GB, a capacity that nobody has never reached. The second place is occupied by Toshiba with (only) 120GB.

More than that, the firm is now entering 1.3-inch drives (see also another today's press release). That's really a big surprise as this form factor was completely abandoned by the industry in favor of one-inch drives. But it's an interesting idea because with a capacity of 30GB or 40GB, they can compete temporarily with flash disks.

Two years ago, Samsung had a project to enter one-inch units following Toshiba, but both companies finally quits this market unable to avoid the flash competition.

Today, Samsung is the technology leader in hard disk drive. No question.

The only segment where the company is not involved is SAS or FC enterprise drives in 3.5-inch or SFF form factors at rotation speed of 10,000rpm and more, but these devices are more and more in competition with less costly 7,200rpm SATA HDDs.