Samsung intros 500GB shock-ready notebook drive

[Soumen]

Samsung on Tuesday unveiled a new mobile hard drive that it believes will add a level of ruggedization to ordinary notebooks without losing storage. The drive is a 500GB 2.5” hard drive with 250GB per platter. Its main feature is a shock operation tolerance of 400G/2ms. Spinpoint M7 is available in varying capacities such as 250-, 320-, 400- and 500GB. This device is introduced with a new improved controller which reduces power consumption in ‘seek mode’ up to 25 percent as compared to other conventional 2.5-inch drives.

Commenting on the product C.H. Lee, Vice president for Storage sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics said, “Our customers have been requesting hard drives with higher density, lower power and greater reliability for their mobile applications The Spinpoint M7 answers these needs with a high-speed operating shock specification and extraordinary drive capacity for storing large data files, music, photos and videos.”

John Chen, senior director, TRENDFOCUS quoted, “Samsung’s M7 will appeal to notebook PC customers who want to have a hard drive operating shock tolerance for mobile applications in tough environments.”

Spinpoint M7 complies with the European Union’s Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipments (RoHS) regulations. It is completely halogen free and uses two of Samsung’s proprietary technologies called SilentSeek and NoiseGuard to reduce the noise level of the mechanical drive operations.

The company is shipping the qualification samples of the drive to major OEMs, shipments to the US and Europe has begun this month. The shipments to other destinations are to follow accordingly.

[Pugsly]

This 500GB drive is capable of storing up to 160,000 digital images, 125hrs of DVD movies or 60hrs of high definition video images because of its vertical magnetic recording technology. It is light in weight and highly durable. With a spindle speed of 5400rpm, the HDD also features an 8MB cache and native command queuing. It has a 3.0Gbps SATA interface.