Samsung develops SpinPoint M5 HDD and SpinPoint MP1 HDD series

In a bid to get ahead in storage competition, Samsung made not just one but two separate press releases for its hard drive series. The company announced first the development of its SpinPoint M5 hard disk drive series targeted to consumer devices followed by the announcement for SpinPoint MP1 hard disk drive series targeted to enterprise applications.

The SpinPoint M5 series has a single-disk capacity platform ranges between 60 to 160GB and an under development dual-disk model that will provide up to 250GB of storage space.

The series utilizes perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology, and the disk drive design has been optimized to allow ultra-precision adjustment of the head parking ramp position for high-density recording. It has a 5,400rpm spin rate, 1.5Gbps SATA interface and 8MB cache memory.

Samsung claims that the hard drives under M5 series are fifteen-percent quieter and use five-percent less energy than other models with the same storage capacity, which make it attractive to notebook PC or tablet PCs users.

With the surging growth of multimedia content and the rapidly changing mobile environment, the coming 250GB model will be a great factor for mobile users.

The SpinPoint MP1 series provides the industry’s highest storage density of 200 gigabyte (GB) at 7200rpm on a 2.5inch disk base with SATA interface and is designed for enterprise applications such as workstations, RAID (redundant array of independent drives) servers, and blade servers.

This series utilizes perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), a serial ATA 3.0 Gbps interface, and feature native command queuing (NCQ) for high performance.

Samsung claims that the disk drives are protected from vibration and shock by a rotary vibration controller (RVC). An optional digital free-fall sensor (FFS) has been implemented.

With the industry’s highest maximum-density-per-disk at 100GB in the 7200 rpm class 2.5” drives, the SpinPoint MP1 series comes in 80/ 120/ 160/ 200GB capacities with a supporting 8/16MB cache memory.

The mass production for SpinPoint M5 series and SpinPoint MP1 series are scheduled in mid-April and May, respectively.