The big tradeoff with notebook hard drives to get more storage space is normally a loss of rotational speed. The slower the drive rotates the longer it takes to retrieve your data and run your applications from the drive. Samsung announced today a new 250GB HDD for notebooks that uses a fast 7200 RPM spindle speed.

The drive is called the Spinpoint MP2 and it uses the SATA II 3.0Gbps interface, native command queuing and Samsungs SilentSeek and NoiseGuard technologies. The drive also sports a 16MB buffer and is available in sizes from 80GB to 250Gb.

"As the capacity, performance, and stability features are comparable with those of 3.5" hard drives, Samsung's 2.5" drive offers our customers a smaller form factor with a broad range of speed and density choices for advanced data storage," said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. Pricing for the MP2 hasn’t been announced, but it is expected to ship in March 2008 to OEMs.

Via Samsung