Samsung Electronics said it had initiated shipments of its Serial ATA hard disk drives (HDDs) that support numerous capabilities of the Serial ATA II technology. Among improvements the company names faster interconnection type as well as advanced queuing mechanism.

Samsung's new HDDs with Serial ATA-300 interface are available in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities with 7200rpm motor and with 8MB of cache. The manufacturer claims 8.9ms access time and improved performance because of Native Command Queuing. The devices come in 3.5?form-factor.

Samsung said it offers the quietest drives in the industry utilizing its patented NoiseGuard and SilentSeek technologies.

Currently not a lot of computers can support Serial ATA II transfer rate of 300Mb/s. At this time the Serial ATA-300 interface is supported by Intel's recently unveiled 955X core-logic as well as NVIDIA nForce4-series of media and communication processors.

Samsung's new HDDs have estimated street pricing of $93, $120 and $150 for 80GB (HD080HJ), 120GB (HD120IJ) and 160GB (HD160JJ) models respectively.

Hard disk drives incorporating Serial ATA II technologies are also available from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Seagate.

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