Strengthening its line up of portable 1.8" hard drives for external storage markets, Samsung today announced its 250 Gigabyte (GB) 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 125 Gigabytes 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.

"It is easy to carry around and it 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," said Choel-Hee Lee, vice president of marketing Storage System Division, Samsung Electronics.

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. And the N3U 1.8" drive also consumes about 40 percent less power than a 2.5" hard drive of an equivalent capacity.

Samsung now ships industry leading areal density levels for all of its hard disk form factor products with up to 1.5 Terabyte for 3.5" drives, 500GB for 2.5" drives and 250GB for 1.8" drives. The Spinpoint N3U comes in 120-, 160-, 200- and 250-GB 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 $199.00.