Samsung 2.5” 500GB HD drive among new storage solutions on show at CES

Samsung announces 2.5” 500GB HD drive for mainstream applications

Coming hot on the heels of Hitachi's introduction of the the half-terabyte (500GB) Travelstar 5K500 http://www.gizmag.com/hitachi-5k500-asus-m70-notebook/8580/, Samsung's industry standard size Spinpoint M6 consists of three 166GB platters in a 2.5” hard disk drive frame measuring just 9.5mm in height. Mainstream notebook PCs can now support capacity of up to one terabyte by installing two Spinpoint M6 500GB drives.

The Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive features a 5400rpm spindle speed, a 8MB cache, and 3.0Gbps SATA interface with a free fall sensor and a rotational vibration sensor available as optional features. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology enables the 500GB drive to store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video images. The drive also features Samsung’s Flying on Demand head technology that improves recording stability over changing temperature ranges.

Samsung’s Spinpoint M6 500GB is set for release in March 2008.

New F1 RAID Class 3.5” SATA hard drive featuring 1TB of capacity from Samsung

Finally Samsung has also announced its new F1 RAID Class 3.5” SATA hard drive featuring 1TB of capacity specifically designed and manufactured for enterprise storage and surveillance applications. Offering the world’s highest recording density using only three platters and running at 7,200rpm, the F1R drive is designed for demanding applications such as database, email servers, web servers, super computing, software development, data warehousing, surveillance, call center and nearline/backup storage systems.

The Spinpoint F1R provids a mean time between failure (MTBF) of up to 1.2 million hours and offers enterprise class features such as command completion time limit, and vibration tolerance with RV controller (RVC). It features a 16 or 32MB cache, a Serial ATA 3.0Gbps interface, a 175MB/s maximum media transfer rate, and NCQ for random I/O performance. The three-platter structure provides a higher data storage density per platter (334GB), resulting in faster data processing speeds when compared with other 1TB drives. The optimized electronics and power saving modes reduce power consumption and resulting heat dissipation, which Smasung claims makes the F1R the coolest operating 1TB drive in its class using an average of 6.7 watts in idle mode and an average of 7.2 watts in random seek mode under test conditions. In addition, the drive operates at just 2.7 Bell in idle mode.

Samsung says the new Spinpoint F1R is ideal for use in video surveillance and similar environments with critical features such as high reliability in heavy-duty, 24/7 operations, low power consumption, improved performance, high capacity, and A/V streaming firmware command set. The Spinpoint F1R ensures low heat generation and power consumption, high durability and stability in extreme environments (low/high temperatures, high humidity), stable performance for prolonged operation periods, and large storage capacity for extended recording time. Samsung has also improved recording stability via PMR recording and data integrity, and reliability through full-extent dynamic Flying-On-Demand (FOD) control. This advanced FOD control technology ensures enhanced read/write sensitivity by dynamically lowering the fly-height in read or write mode while maintaining a consistent and higher fly-height across the disk in standard mode.

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