Samsung's New Spinpont M6 500GB 2.5" Hard Drive is World's Highest Capacity HDD for Laptops

Notebook hard drives have a ways to go before catching up to their desktop brethren in terms of storage capacity, and Samsung takes them one step closer. With the release of Samsung's new Spintpoint M6 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive, the company can lay claim to offering the world's highest capacity HDD for notebooks.

Samsung stuffed three 167GB platters into the 9.5mm high Spinpoint, and combined with the perpendicular magnetic recording technology, the company says its new drive can store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video images.

With a 5400RPM spindle speed and 8MB of cache, the new drive looks to focus more on storage space and reliability than all-out performance, though it does sport a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. Other performance specifications include

• 12ms average seek
• 5.6ms average latency
• 860 Mbits/s data transfer rate (to/from buffer)
• 300 MB/s data transfer rate (to/from host)
• 600,000 controlled ramp load/unload

At standby, Samsung says its new Spinpoint will sip just .25W, and typically 2.3W during read/write operations. MSRP has been set to $299.

Image Credit: Samsung