CES Samsung isn't the first manufacturer to take the wraps off a laptop-friendly 500GB hard drive - take a bow, Hitachi - but it did claim today to be the first to announce a 9.5mm-high unit. It also touted a 128GB solid-state drive for notebooks.

Samsung's SpinPoint M6: half a terabyte

The SpinPoint M6 follows the standard 2.5in form-factor for notebook hard drives. It contains 8MB of cache, has a 3Gb/s SATA interface and is fitted with the now obligatory sudden-drop sensor. Some versions come with a second detector, this time for rotational vibration.

The 500GB Spinpoint M6 is expected to go on sale in March.

Samsung's 128GB SSD

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The tightest Samsung could narrow down the availability of its 2.5in 128GB SSD was sometime before July. It did say the drive will use a 3Gb/s SATA interface and offer a write speed of 70MB/s – a record for this type of drive, it claimed.

The SSD reads data at 100MB/s. Samsung said it uses native command queuing and spread-spectrum clocking to add to its higher performance levels. The drive also features device/host-initiated power management for an “exceptionally low” power consumption level of 0.5W in active mode.

The company also claimed the drive will offer a mean time between failures (MTBF) of one million hours.