Samsung launches 500GB laptop drive

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 7th January 2008

While this isn't a pic of the new Samsung drive, they all look pretty durn similar with the lid off.

Liked the look of the Hitachi 500GB laptop drive only to feel a crushing sense of bitter disappointment when you realised it wouldn't fit in your existing laptop? Yeah, well, Samsung's got your back.

The company has announced the new Spinpoint M6 500GB, which is a standard-height drive suitable for pretty much any laptop (BIOS support for such large drives permitting).

Other than the voluminous capacity, the specs aren't anything to get excited about: a spindle speed of 5,400RPM, 8MB of cache, and the same SATA 3.0Gb/s interface and rotational vibration sensor we saw on the Hitachi model.

One feature that isn't on the Hitachi is something Samsung describes as “Flying on Demand head technology”, which the company claims will improve data stability over varying temperature ranges.

Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing at Samsung, took the opportunity of the products CES launch to have a little dig at the non-standard effort from rival Hitachi, saying “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”.

While he didn't actually say “unlike those suckers at Hitachi”, it's a pretty clear subtext. Rather interestingly, Andy was silent as to the power usage of the new drive: could it be that the Hitachi can scrape a draw on points?

Tempted, or are you still hooked on SSD technology? Give us your thoughts over in the forums.