To meet the growing storage needs of laptop users, Samsung Electronics on Tuesday introduced a 500GB hard drive that could provide a notebook PC with as much as 1TB of storage. The Spinpoint M6 is a 2.5-inch hard drive fitted with three 167GB platters spinning at 5,400 rpm. Priced at $299, it will ship to PC makers and retail stores later this month. 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 because of its 7,200 rpm rotation speed and extra-large 16MB cache. With the MP2, the company also provides an optional chip that protects a hard drive from vibrations caused by other hardware components. The Spinpoint MP2 is priced at $299 too and will be available through retailers soon. An 80GB version of the hard drive is also available, according to the company. Both drives come with an optional free-fall sensor, which parks the head and turns the hard drive off in the event of a fall, protecting the data on it.