Samsung has announced that it is shipping a 2.5-inch 500GB hard drive and a fast 22X DVD burner.

The Spinpoint M6, the world’s smallet 500GB HD, is 9.5mm tall, meaning that it will fit into most laptop hard drive bays. The drive boasts a 5400rpm spindle speed, 8MB cache, and a 3.0Gbps SATA interface. Fairly average specs, but if you’re having issues fitting all of your music and movies onto your laptop HD, then this is the drive for you.

Samsung’s other offering is the SH-S223 DVD burner capable of burning data at high speeds, even on low-speed discs. The drive is capable of 22X DVD±R recording, 16X DVD+R Dual Layer recording, 12X DVD-R Dual Layer recording, 12X DVD-RAM recording, 8X DVD+RW recording, and 6X DVD-RW recording. Those speeds mean that a regular DVD±R disc can be burned in about 4.5 minutes, with all of the other formats taking a shorter amount of time than average as well.

If you absolutely have to have the latest and greatest, then both of these drives are for you (assuming you have both a desktop and laptop). Otherwise, it will probably be a good idea to hold off for a while as the drives will be fairly expensive. The Spinpoint M6 will retail for $299, with no price set for the SH-S223.

It seems that Sony has just about put a nail in Toshiba’s HD DVD coffin with their latest announcement. The tech giant has been able to shrink the Blu-ray module to a more compact size, meaning that Blu-ray drives will be getting smaller and, more importantly, cheaper.

The new laser unit is a measly 3mm thick. Sony thinks that the device will make it to 9.5mm laptop drives by the end of the year.

A few more features of the new laser - it can handle dual-layer discs as well as those with organic dye in the recording layers. This is good news as organic discs can be made on current DVD production lines, which probably means cheaper prices.

It’s a good thing that the format war is finally winding down. Both formats are great, and have their separate strengths, but it’s good to finally know which player to buy.

Netflix has announced plans to offer a Mac version of their Watch Instantly streaming service sometime this year. Netflix executive Reed Hastings dismissed Apple’s new iTunes rental service:

“You only have 24 hours in which to complete watching the movie [on iTunes], so if you watch over two nights, you pay twice. DVD rentals advantages over VoD are ubiquity of content, ubiquity of DVD players, an early window for new releases, and lower prices.”

Watch Instantly is a Video on Demand service that, for $5 a month, allows subscribers to watch as many movies as they’d like with no other charges or fees. The system is currently heavily dependent on Windows Media copy protection mechanisms, which aren’t available on the Mac.

I think this is fantastic news, seeing as Netflix has a very comprehensive library of films (although only 6,000 are currently available through Watch Instantly, that number is bound to go up as the service really takes off) and being able to access them on a Mac allows a wider audience of people to take advantage of the program. Thank you Netflix!

Photo: http://gizmodo.com