Photographers are continually on the hunt for more storage space with internal drives and external drives—we're all looking for places to stash more and more bits.

Which is why laptops are especially vexing to the average photographer. Here we are with an incredibly powerful portable computer and at the most we can get a few hundred Gigabytes of storage space in the thing, requiring us to carry around external drives just to store or myriad photos.

However, Samsung has photographers in mind with their new line of Spinpoint drives—high-capacity hard drives that happen to fit inside a standard laptop enclosure. (This is key because drives from Fujitsu and Hitachi that are competing with Samsung in the storage arena aren't exactly kosher in their height, so they won't fit into all laptops.)

The Spinpoint M6 crams a whopping 500GB of drive space into that standard-height 2.5-inch enclosure. That's 60 hours of HD video, 125 hours of DVD quality video or hundreds of thousands of photos. By comparison, that's twice the size of the currently-available drives in any laptop on the market. It's a heck of a lot of space and the drive will only cost $299.

It will be some time before these drives arrive in volume at hardware manufacturers like Apple, Dell and others, so don't expect to be able to purchase a stock configuration from one of the drive companies with a 500GB drive for a few months, but if you're willing to tinker inside the heart of your laptop (or pay someone to tinker for you) then you can get this 5400 RPM drive up and running in no time.The teeny drive is also packed with a ton of goodies, including a freefall sensor (which parks the heads in case the drive senses it's about to be dropped) and the ability to work in a really wide range of temperatures, something that's usually an issue to drives.