Today, Samsung announced a new hard disk drive series, the Spinpoint N2 series, that is going to shake some things up in the ultraportable market.
It’s a 1.8-inch Hard Disk Drive (HDD) that runs at 4200 RPM, and has a capacity of up to 160GB.
This will be welcome news for the Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) market, as well as ultraportable and small laptops.
Samsung expects that “the 1.8inch HDD market will grow at a tremendous pace with annual sales expected to increase up to 65% by 2010 as consumers demand smaller, more compact technology devices”.
Besides being used in UMPCs and ultraportable laptops, the 1.8″ drives will also find their way into HDD-based camcorders and potentially iPods and other Portable Media Players (PMP).
Right now, the only drive in the series announced so far is one with a 160GB of capacity – able to store, in Samsung’s words, more than 40,000 MP3 files or 100 HD quality movies. Just for perspective, the current 30GB and 80GB iPods use 1.8″ hard drives.