Nice, but the Samsung MP6 here only spins at 5400 rpm.

Samsung also announced the Spinpoint MP2 hard drive, a 2.5-inch drive with 250GB of storage. Aimed at desktop replacement notebooks, workstations and blade servers, it provides quicker read and write speeds than the M6. The hard drive spins at 7,200 rpm.

Faster, but 1/2 the capacity. The "parked-head-upon-drop" feature is cool. I tend to try not to drop my laptop though!

The 500GB drive marks a significant milestone in portable storage: On notebooks that support dual-hard drive configurations, a 500GB drive means you can have a whopping 1TB of storage in a laptop computer.

Makes me think why you would want such an amount of data on a portable device without a decent backup facility in the first place. It takes a few hundred DVD-R disks to make a backup. No-one would do this in practice. I once dropped my laptop on a concrete floor from about 50 cm. It was when I realized that my policy of having the larger part of my data on a server type computer and only carrying with me working copies of data and programs was a good decision. (The laptop and disk survived the fall BTW).

I cannot imaging what type of data you would carry on your laptop which needs 1TB storage space. Only a large number of movies in high definition format may come close.

Good point. I imagine sales presentations with high definition audio/video and engineering demos are a couple of reasons. I've seen folks carrying around external drives so there must be a need and where there's a need there's a sale.

Or perhaps they are just gearing up for future releases of Windows Operating Systems ;)