CeBIT 2008: Samsung Ships First 500GB Laptop Hard Drive March 05, 2008

Read more Gizmodo UK , Laptops , Mobile Devices , Portable Media , Storage

It wasn’t so many years ago that laptops were sniggered at by PC users waving their big fat HDDs around. Today, all of that is well and truly over as Samsung becomes the first company to ship a 500GB hard disk drive for laptops.

The 2.5in Spinpoint M6 HDD is just 9.5mm high and consists of three 167GB platters. Samsung said mainstream notebooks could now fit two of these drives inside to boost storage to a mind-boggling 1TB. Just last month Buffalo gave us the first 500GB HDD for our pockets.

“Our customers require more and more notebook storage for their data, video and music files,” said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. “Our Spinpoint M6 easily fits within notebook PCs with no modification to the notebook PC chassis, giving users more storage power than ever before.”

In what it calls ‘premium notebooks’, the Spinpoint M6 meets the Microsoft fast-boot design requirements and supports ramp load and unload of up to 600,000 times. The drive spins at 5800rpm, has 8MB of cache and a 3Gbps SATA interface. There’s also an optional Free-Fall-Sensor for those unforeseen laptop falls.

The 500GB drive can store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies or 60 hours of high definition video. It’s shipping now in the US for around £150.-Martin Lynch

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