Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a worldwide leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, announced today that it is shipping the world’s first half-terabyte (500GB) 2.5” mobile hard drive – the new Spinpoint M6. The Spinpoint M6 is designed to fit the industry’s standard 9.5mm height dimension and armed with a massive 500GB capacity, the drive is targeted to meet the growing storage needs of today’s notebook computers as well as slim form factor PCs and high density mobile applications.

“Our customers require more and more notebook storage for their data, video and music files”, said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. “Our Spinpoint M6 easily fits within notebook PCs with no modification to the notebook PC chassis, giving users more storage power than ever before. “

Samsung’s new Spinpoint M6 consists of three 167GB platters in a 2.5” hard drive frame measuring just 9.5mm in height. This critical feature enables notebook PC manufacturers to easily integrate the Spinpoint M6 into tens of millions of notebook PCs that ship every quarter.

Mainstream notebook PCs can now support capacity of up to one terabyte by employing two Samsung Spinpoint M6 drives. For premium notebook PCs, the Spinpoint M6 meets fast-boot requirements and supports ramp load and unload up of 600,000 times.

The Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive features a 5400rpm spindle speed, a 8MB cache, and 3.0Gbps SATA interface with a Free-Fall-Sensor available as an optional feature. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology enables the 500GB drive to store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video images. The drive also features Samsung’s Flying-on-Demand head technology that improves recording stability over changing temperature ranges.