Samsung has announced two new series of 2.5" hard discs, the SpinPoint M5 series for consumer devices and the SpinPoint MP1 series for enterprise applications. The new SpinPoint M5 series features perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology with capacity ranges of 60GB to 160GB, a 5,400rpm spindle, 1.5Gbps SATA and 8MB of cache. Other features include 15% quieter and 5% less energy consumption compared with other models of the same capacity, making them attractive for laptop and tablet PCs. The 160GB model also features a reduced weight of just 94.83g, aimed at minimising the weight of the target product. A 250GB dual-disk model is currently under development, which aims to cater for the growing multimedia market.
For enterprise applications, Samsung is developing its series of SpinPoint MP1 2.5" hard drives, which will feature a 7,200rpm spindle, native command queuing (NCQ) and a serial ATA 3.0 Gbps interface for high performance. Other features include a rotary vibration controller (RVC) to guard against vibration and shock and a digital free-fall sensor (FFS). The drives will be available with a capacity choice of 80GB, 120GB, 160GB or 200GB and 8MB or 16MB of cache. While the features make these appear to be targeted at high end laptops, Samsung's target for these include workstations, RAID servers and blade servers, however, there is no doubt that some will use these to improve the performance of their laptop or tablet PC.
According to Samsung, the 2.5" hard drive market is growing at a double-digit annual growth rate, predicting a 20% grown in 2007. The M5 series will begin mass production in mid-April with an SATA interface, followed by production with a PATA interface in May. The enterprise SpinPoint MP1 series is expected to begin mass production in May.
Further information on these hard drives can be found in this SpinPoint M5 press release and this SpinPoint MP1 press release.
