A source claimed Sunday night that Samsung was looking to sell off its hard drive business. The Korean company had set a target price of $1.5 billion but was eager enough to sell it for under $1 billion if it couldn't fetch the intended target. Seagate was the only named candidate from the Wall Street Journal's tip, but it wasn't clear how likely the US company was to land the deal.
Samsung became the latest to crack the 1TB barrier for notebook hard drives late Monday with the Spinpoint MT2. The 2.5-inch drive fits into a full-height 12.5mm (half-inch) bay by using newer density storage that fits 333GB per platter. While not the first such drive, Samsung has claimed a speed edge with 20 percent faster transfer speeds and four percent less power use than its Western Digital equivalent.
Samsung today added a new, high-speed desktop drive to its Spinpoint mix. Although topping out at 320GB, the F4 is designed for speed with its entire storage in a single, half-platter design that drastically cuts back on the seek time. The disk is estimated to run about 10 percent faster than the earlier F3 yet still uses about seven percent less power.
Samsung has expanded its line of hard drives with the Spinpoint MP4, a 2.5-inch HDD featuring 7,200rpm rotation speed and capacities up to 640GB. The new notebook drive brings higher speeds to the company's 640GB notebook offerings, delivering a 30-percent performance improvement over 5400rpm models and doubling the cache size to 16MB.
Samsung tonight advanced hard drives in cautious form by upgrading the density, not the capacity, of its Spinpoint line. The Spinpoint F3 reaches a maximum 1TB of space but does so using only two 500GB platters instead of the usual three or four; the move significantly increases the speed of accessing data as much as 30 percent by reducing the seek time for data. It moreover improves the reliability of the drives by reducing the number of moving parts.
Samsung on Thursday expanded what's possible with very small hard drives with an upgrade to the Spinpoint N line. The N3U first achieves a storage record with up to 250GB of space in a 1.8-inch disk, spreading the data across two platters. The capacity would give portable media players and netbooks the same capacity as a typical 2.5-inch notebook drive but in both a smaller form (smaller than a credit card) and while using 40 percent less power.
Samsung on Tuesday unveiled a new mobile hard drive that it believes will add a level of ruggedization to ordinary notebooks without losing storage. The 500GB Spinpoint M7 has the same footprint as a typical 2.5-inch drive but has a shock tolerance of 400G/2ms and a hardened shell that reduces the likelihood of the drive skipping or otherwise taking damage. Simultaneously, a new drive controller at once lowers active power consumption by about 25 percent while speeding up access by about 18 percent versus normal notebook hard drives.
