Samsung crashes the perpendicular party with bevy of laptop drives

While Toshiba's sittin' pretty with its 200GB perpendicular laptop drive, Samsung is finally deciding to join Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital (just to name a few) in the perpendicular byte stacking game. The newly-unveiled 2.5-inch M80 / M80 SATA series features a trio of drives each, with capacities in 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB, 8MB of onboard cache, and a 5400RPM spindle speed. While the swifter SATA drives will likely benchmark a bit better than the PATA counterparts, both versions sport perpendicular magnetic recording to prevent data corruption, as well as "industry leading free-fall sensors" that pack 700G of operating shock tolerance. Furthermore, Samsung equipped these newfangled drives with a fluid dynamic bearing motor and its own Hybrid Latch System, which reportedly "eliminates unpleasant rattling noises and significantly reduces the clicking noise generated when a drive moves its heads on and off the disk." Although Samsung left us in the dark regarding pricing and availability, we don't envision the firm keeping these behind closed doors much longer than they already have.

[Via TG Daily]