Samsung Electronics Co. has announced it is shipping its highest capacity 7,200 RPM hard-disk drive for notebooks and other mobile devices. Samsung’s Spinpoint MP4 is a 2.5-in. serial ATA drive with up to 640GB of capacity.
Samsung’s announcement came on the heels of Western Digital’s announcing its highest capacity 10,000 RPM SATA hard drive, which has up to 600GB of capacity. That drive has a suggested retail price of US$329. Samsung would not release a suggested retail price for its drive.
The Spinpoint MP4, which comes in 250GB, 320GB, 500GB and 640GB capacities, uses a SATA 3Gbit/sec. interface and Native Command Queuing, along with 16MB of onboard cache, to improve performance. The drive has a maximum data transfer rate of 189MB/sec. and a seek time of 11 milliseconds.
Samsung said its newest drive follows on the success of its Spinpoint M7E 5400 RPM, a 2.5-in. notebook hard drive released last year, which can also hold up to 640GB.
“We had very good uptake from major [equipment manufacturers],” said H.S. Lee, vice president of storage for Samsung. “We’re targeting this disk product at gamers and multi-taskers and enthusiastic users, especially for high-performance PC applications. This has 30 per cent more performance compared to standard 5,400 RPM HDD.”
Lee said sales of Samsung’s hard disk drives in the first half of 2009 were “miserable, but by the end of the year, they were “very good.”
Samsung is also targeting the new MP4 product for use in external hard drives. Lee said the company expects to sell about 50 million external drives this year.
