Samsung launched the drive on Tuesday at a storage event in San Jose, where the company also announced a faster, 250-Gbyte version, the Spinpoint M2. (The M2 spins at 7,200 RPM, while the M6 spins at 5,400 RPM.)

Samsung also announced an interesting DVD burner, the SH-S223 drive, which can apparently force cheaper, slower-speed media to burn safely at higher speeds. Finally, Samsung confirmed that its solid-state drives are being used inside the superslim Lenovo ThinkPad X300, which was introduced this month to compete with the Apple MacBook Air.

The Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive features a 5,400 RPM spindle speed, an 8-MB cache, and a 3.0-Gbit/s SATA interface with an optional free-fall sensor, an increasingly common technology which can park the heads in a afe, secure location if a drop is sensed. The Spinpoint M6 is currently shipping with an MSRP of $299, Samsung said.

The SH-S223 is also an interesting addition, proving that there's still quite a lot of life in the world of DVD burners. The specs seems relatively straightforward: 22X DVD±R recording, 12X DVD-RAM recording, 16X DVD+R Dual Layer recording, 12X DVD-R Dual Layer recording, 8X DVD+RW recording and 6X DVD-RW recording. But with a technology called over-speed recording, users can also burn slower media at faster speeds: users can write at 22X speeds on 16X media and 12X speeds on 8X media, according to Samsung. That could save you a few bucks, depending on the speed and number of discs you're buying at one time.

Finally, Samsung's statement about its SSDs being used inside the new Lenovo X300 seems innocuous, except for the bit in this BusinessWeek article, where Lenovo's primary SSD supplier could not pass quality control in time for the product's launch. The story implies that Samsung was the backup supplier. I wonder who screwed up?