Samsung Electronics is the first hard drive manufacturer to ship a 500GB 2.5-inch drive. Samsung announced its drive was shipping in volume to OEMs and PC makers today. As you probably know, Hitachi GST and Fujitsu have also announced their upcoming new solutions already. Hitachi's drive was supposed to ship in February, but is now expected to ship later this month. Fujitsu says its drive will ship in May.

However, both Hitachi and Fujitsu are taking a different approach to 500GB than Samsung. All three drive makers use three disk platters, but Hitachi and Fujitsu reach 500GB by expanding the height of the drive from 9.5mm – the common standard for most notebooks – to 12.5mm, a height that's increasingly accommodated on larger, desktop-replacement laptop designs, but not necessarily on more general-use laptops. This way the Samsung solution seems to be the most interesting.

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.