Samsung this week announced the Spinpoint M8 internal hard drive with 1TB capacity, which could raise the bar in storage available on laptops.
The drive has two 500GB platters and is 9.5-millimeter (0.37 inches) high, so the drive can fit easily into laptop storage bays. The 5400 rpm Spinpoint M8 is priced at US$129, and available in the U.S. and Europe.
With users storing more video and images on laptops, demand for storage is rising. Most of the laptops today come with hard-drive storage capacity of up to 750GB, and some PC makers offer the option to expand storage with two slots.
Apple, for example, offers up to 750GB of storage in its MacBook Pro laptops. Dell doesn’t offer storage of more than 500GB per hard drive in its Latitude business laptops. Hewlett-Packard offers 750GB of storage per slot in its Envy laptops and buyers can select two drives for a total of 1.5TB of storage on a laptop.
Companies such as Toshiba and Western Digital offer 1TB internal laptop drives, but top laptop makers are not yet offering 1TB drives as an option. Desktop hard drives with 1TB storage are now commonly available.
The Spinpoint M8 drive is denser than earlier models as it can store more data per unit area, Samsung said. The drive is also more power efficient as it carries fewer components like heads to seek and access data.
The disk is about 7 percent faster than its predecessor and uses 8 percent less power, Samsung said.
The drive operates on the 3 gigabits per second SATA interface and has 8MB buffer memory. It generates less noise and an overall redesign of the drive structure protects the disc from physical fracture and data loss, Samsung said.