Samsung announced today that it is now shipping its 500GB Spinpoint M6 notebook hard drive. The drive uses three platters that each have 167GB of storage space. The rotational speed is 5400 RPM and the drive is 9.5mm thick.

"Our customers require more and more notebook storage for their data, video and music files", said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. "Our Spinpoint M6 easily fits within notebook PCs with no modification to the notebook PC chassis, giving users more storage power than ever before."

The Spinpoint M6 features an 8MB cache and uses the 3.0Gbps SATA interface common on all newer notebooks. Samsung uses perpendicular magnetic recording to allow the 500GB of storage to store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of HD video. The drive is available now for $299.

Via Samsung