| Samsung Electronics has announced its new 160GB hard drive using 2.5" disks. Capacity of the single-disk platform ranges between 60 and 160GB, while a dual-disk model is under development that will provide up to 250GB of storage space. Samsung has already shipped test samples of the new SpinPoint M5 Series to OEM vendors and plans to begin mass production in mid-April. The M5 Series has been developed specifically for portable consumer electronics, where the key to success lies in controlling noise, vibration and power consumption. Samsung's SpinPoint M5 hard drives are fifteen-percent quieter and use five-percent less energy than other models with the same storage capacity. The low-noise, low-power features are attractive to notebook PC or tablet PCs users. The new SpinPoint M5 hard drives feature a 5,400rpm spin rate, 1.5Gbps SATA interface and 8MB cache memory. PATA models will be added to the lineup in May. The SpinPoint M5 series utilizes perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, and the disk drive design has been optimized to allow ultra-precision adjustment of the head parking ramp position for high-density recording. "The 2.5"hard drive market is registering double-digit annual growth, and we expect at least a twenty-percent growth increase in 2007," said Hyung Keun Park, executive vice president and general manager of Samsung Electronics' Storage System Division. "With hard disk drives rapidly moving beyond PCs to include consumer electronics, we will provide customers with a new lineup of products with the highest available capacity and the best performance to enable new applications." The 250GB model to follow will greatly expand the storage capacity of mobile products, in step with the surging growth of multimedia content and the rapidly changing mobile environment. The weight of the 160GB hard drive has also been reduced by approximately 4 percent from 98.66g to 94.83g, helping manufacturers to lighten their finished products. |
