Samsung said Wednesday that it has launched the Spinpoint M1, a 2.5-inch enterprise hard disk drive, with capacities up to 200GB.

Let me tell you why that's interesting: There was a time about six years ago that a young reporter, experienced in covering the hard disk drive industry, asked the question, "What do we really need all this storage for?"

This was during the early days of CD-ROMs, when it wasn't all that unusual for older software to still use floppies. What this question also predated, however, was TiVo. Suddenly video was a commodity that we could store and review at our leisure, and that gave way to ripping DVDs, YouTube, the works. Now storage is as important as a CPU, and maybe even more so.

Generally speaking, desktop hard disks come in 3.5-inch form factors, where the disk platter itself is 3.5 inches across. There's no commonly accepted explanation for why that is that I'm aware of.

Laptop drives come in 2.5-inch form factors. All this means is that they're smaller, allowing them to draw less power as they spin. Because they are smaller, however (hearken back to your geometry class) they need to spin faster to pass the same amount of data through the drive's read head. The M1 spins at 7,200 RPM, which is generally considered to be on the faster end; the fastest drives spin at 10,000 RPM. The M1s also have an optional digital free-fall sensor, which allows them to quickly park the read head in a safe spot if the drive falls while it's powered on. Otherwise, it could scratch the disk head.

What's nice, however, is that as you increase the drive's capacity, more data is packed within that area. That increases data throughput as the capacity increases.

What all this means is that these drives aren't going to be as fast as the 3.5-inch enterprise monsters, or even the drive in your PC. But as capacity points in these 2.5-inch drives ramp up, it means more storage for enterprise applications like workstations, as well as consumer applications like your PVR -- without a lot of power. And that can only be a good thing.

Post by Mark Hachman