Strengthening its line up of portable 1.8-inch hard drives for external storage markets, Samsung Electronics has announced its 250GB 1.8-inch hard disk drive, the Spinpoint N3U, which incorporates a native USB controller on its printed circuit board. The Spinpoint N3U stores up to 125GBs per platter for a total 250GB data storage capacity.
Most external hard drives require the addition of a bridge circuit board to convert the hard drive's PATA interface into a USB interface. Samsung's N3U drive, however, uses a native USB interface and as such does not require this bridge board.
The device is designed to withstand a free fall drop of up to 50 centimeters and be resistant to a maximum shock incident of up to 1500G.
As a native USB interface device, the Spinpoint N3U eliminates possible points of failure due to loose cable connections and optimizes performance by eliminating the interrupt service time for the bridge board to convert PATA to USB signals, Samsung argued. And the N3U 1.8-inch drive also consumes about 40% less power than a 2.5-inch hard drive of an equivalent capacity.
Samsung now ships hard disks with up to 1.5 Terabyte for 3.5-inch drives, 500GB for 2.5-inch drives and 250GB for 1.8-inch drives. The Spinpoint N3U comes in 120-, 160-, 200- and 250GB capacities, the disk rotation speed is 3600rpm, and it supports a USB 2.0 interface. The drives are equipped with an 8MB cache memory.
Initial shipments to OEMs are scheduled from mid-July with a MSRP at US$199.