Top How-Tos / Advice articles

IT Jobs

Did you know? Techworld now offers an IT Jobs section with hundreds of jobs! Current job listings are now available for Software Developers, Web Developers, Application Engineers, Project Managers, Graduate opportunities and more. Apply for your new IT job today!

Samsung packs 200Gig in 2.5-in drive

Tiny monster ups the storage stakes.

By Chris Mellor, Techworld | Techworld
Published: 08:48 GMT, 13 April 07

Samsung has announced a 2.5-inch drive with 40GB greater capacity than any from its rivals.

Seagate or Fujitsu have 2.5-inch drives that top out at 160 Gbyte. Samsung says it is offering the industry's highest available density at 100 GB/platter for 7200rpm drives - and has promised a 50GB uplift to 250Gbyte.

The SpinPoint MP1 provides between 80- and 200GB on its two platters, spins at 7200rpm and has a 3.0 Gbit/s serial ATA (SATA) interface. It is designed for blade servers, general servers, RAID arrays and workstations. It has perpendicular recording and native command queuing (NCQ), as competitor drives do. What is unique for an enterprise drive is a rotary vibration controller plus a drop sensor that parks the head if free fall acceleration is detected.

Either Samsung intends this drive for top-end notebook use, or the drive casing and controller unit are common to both the enterprise and notebook versions of the drive. It's cheaper to leave it in than take it out.

The drop sensor is a feature of the M5 notebook version of the drive. It offers 60 to 160GB of capacity on its single platter and spins at 5400rpm. A dual platter version is coming with a forecast 250GB capacity. Samsung said the drive was both quieter and less power-hungry than other suppliers' 2.5-inch drives. It has a 1.5 Gbit/s SATA interface and 8MB of cache. Parallel ATA versions will be added next month.

Seagate's Momentus notebook drive offers a lower 100 GB capacity but faster rotation, meaning faster disk I/O, at 7200rpm.

Hyung Keun Park, Samsung Electronics’ Storage System Division EVP, said: "The 2.5-inch hard drive market is registering double-digit annual growth, and we expect at least a twenty percent increase in 2007." He thinks the 2.5-inch form factor is applicable both to enterprise servers and desktops, notebooks and also consumer electronics devices.

MP1 samples will be available in early May, with mass production scheduled in late May. M5 mass production begins this month and OEMs already have samples.

If 2.5-inch drives become popular for workstations then the need for separate system cabinets will become less and the notebook form factor could make further inroads into the desktop computing market.

What are your views on this subject? Use the form below to post a comment on this article up to 500 characters.

Characters remaining: 500

Related Storage news

HP tool offers continous laptop backup

Set it and forget.

19 November 2009

Intel fixes drive bricking firmware update for flash drives

Company to re-release SSD software

IBM offers Lotus Symphony on Keepod USB devices

Thin USB device uses VMware to provide secure access to the Lotus suite

Sun claims record-breaking storage array

Says Storage 7000 is fastest on the planet

Related Storage reviews

Email this article to a friend or colleague:

PLEASE NOTE: Your name is used only to let the recipient know who sent the story, and in case of transmission error. Both your name and the recipient's name and address will not be used for any other purpose.

Techworld White Papers

Database security: Preventing enterprise data leaks at the source

IDC discusses the growing internal threats to business information, the impact of government regulations on the protection of data, and how enterprises must adopt database security best practices...

Download Whitepaper

Service-oriented security

SOA has become an integral part of enterprise software by providing a framework to efficiently develop software as services that is easily sharable, reusable, and integrated. No where is the need more apparent than in the Identity Management space. Welcome to the age of Service-Oriented Security (SOS).

Download Whitepaper

Data protection prospective vendor checklist

Organisations need a way to map business needs against all these challenges in procuring a technical solution. To help, SANS has developed the following Prospective Vendor Checklist.

Download Whitepaper

Unlock the power of the mainframe

This whitepaper presents the notion of CICS as an integration hub based on a component-based, service-oriented architecture supporting Web services. Highlights will review the challenges and contrasted support for Web services natively in CICS.

Download Whitepaper

Techworld UK - Technology - Business

COLT White Paper

Are all VoIP services the same?

Questions to ask your service provider to ensure you get the VoIP service you need
With careful choice of partner, your business can have all the advantages of VoIP access - reduced costs, flexibility and simplicity - without the drawbacks.
This white paper is your guide to ensure you get right the VoIP service and details the pitfalls which businesses would do well to avoid.

Download white paper
BMC

Ride the express lane in the journey to speed ITIL adoption

Explore the challenges in making the journey to ITIL and the criteria for selecting consulting services
By following ITIL practices, your IT organisation will become more closely integrated with the business. We recommend making the journey to ITIL in a sequence of six incremental steps, the phases of which are driven through execution of a strategic transformational roadmap.

Download white paper

Webcast: IT Financial Management: Cost Optimisation for Efficiency and Agility.
On Demand Webcast
Join this webcast to learn about the techniques and technologies that can help you prove the value of IT to the business by understanding the true cost of today's IT services and those that will be necessary to deliver future success.

Register Today

Site Map

IDG Network

* *