Samsung has been promising to bring standard 9.5mm-height 2.5-inch hard drives to market for a while now, teasing storage-hungry notebook owners. Now, the company is making good on its claims, announcing that its 500 GB Spinpoint M6 drives have entered mass production and are currently shipping. Samsung also took the opportunity to announce the Spinpoint M2, a 250 GB hard drive spinning at 7,200 rpm for high-performance applications.
“The Spinpoint M6 is ideal for notebook power users who require vast amounts of storage space for their data, video and music files,” said Samsung Semiconductor’s director of storage Hubbert Smith, in a statement. “The MP2 has speed, features and capacity similar to a 3.5-inch hard drive and is perfect for users who require a smaller form factor with advanced data storage needs.”
The M6 isn’t the first 500 MB notebook drive on the market, but unlike others—say, the three-platter Fujitsu MHZ2 BT—the M6 is a standard 9.5mm in height, making it a drop-in installation/replacement for systems designed to handle that height…and nothing more. The Spinpoint M6 runs at 5,400rpm, features an 8 MB cache, and a 3 Gb/s SATA interface. Samsung is offering a free-fall sensor as an optional feature.
The Spinpoint M2 is a two-platter unit running at 7,200 rpm and features a 3 Gb/s SATA II interface; the drive also sports Samsung’s SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies to keep the unit running quiet, and is optionally available with a free-fall sensor.
Along with hard drive announcements, Samsung has added the portable external TruDirect SE-T084M to its line of DVD writers. With the SE-T084M, users can burn digital content through a PC directly to DVD media without first transferring digital video to the PC’s hard drive: just connect a digital video camera and press play, then use teh TruDirect software to write the stream directly to DVD. Samsung claims its TruDirect technology means writing an hour’s worth of video to DVD takes only an hour an five minutes; if users transfer the file to the PC first, that tie comes down to just about 30 minutes. The drive can also handle 8× DVD±R burning, 6× DVD±R dual layer writing, and 5×DVD-RAM writing. The external TruDirect drive weights less than one pound, offers a slot-loading mechanism, and even runs off bus power without an AC adapter. (We’re assuming USB 2.0, but Samsung doesn’t actually say.) The SE-T084M should be available in July for about $149.
