Faster, Larger Capacity Laptops Coming
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CREDIT: Samsung Storage |
The first wave of faster, larger-capacity hard disk drives ships to laptop manufacturers this month and could boost data transfer rates by a factor of ten before the end of the year.
Laptop hard disk drives, which are physically smaller than the drives inside desktops, are becoming increasingly important as more people are using their laptops as their main computers.
This trend means people are storing more on their laptop hard drives than ever before and hard drive makers are making them with bigger storage capacities.
H.S. Lee, vice president of Samsung Storage, announced the new drive at Samsung's "THINnovation" media and analyst event in San Jose, CA.
Laptops use a 2.5" internal drive with up to 500 GB of storage and typically run at 5400 rpm, compared to the standard 3.5" drive found in desktops with higher capacity and faster speeds. Samsung's 7200 rpm Spinpoint MP4 drive can store up to 640 GB of data.
Lee said the drive represents a 30 percent increase in performance and will be especially useful to gamers and those who enjoy keeping their movie collection on their laptops.
"DVD movies use 1.3 GB on an internal drive with compression. With the 640 GB drive, you could store 500 (DVD) movies compared to 384 with 500 GB," Lee told TechNewsDaily.
Users could store 50 Blu-ray DVD movies on the Spinpoint MP4 640 GB drive, compared to only 38 on a 500 GB drive.
USB 3.0 compatible
While Samsung's Spinpoint drive is compatible with current USB 2.0 data connections, it is one of the first drives certified for USB 3.0. Also known as "SuperSpeed" USB, USB 3.0 is a new standard finalized last year for the consumer electronics industry. Lee said the new drives will enable manufacturers to make "SuperSpeed" laptops.
USB 3.0 allows data to be transferred to the drive at much higher rates. For instance, an HD movie that takes about 14 minutes to download today from a video camera to a computer, could be downloaded in just over 60 seconds using "SuperSpeed" USB.
For now, consumers will have to be satisfied with greater capacity and speed built into their laptops, but "SuperSpeed" machines are on the way . USB-IF, the industry's certification and testing organization, told TechNewsDaily it is seeing initial SuperSpeed USB adoption now which will continue throughout 2010 with much broader industry roll-out occurring into 2011.
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