Strengthening its line up of portable 1.8-inch hard drives for external use, Samsung today announced its 250 Gigabyte (GB) 1.8-inch hard disk drive, the Spinpoint N3U which incorporates a native USB 2.0 controller on its printed circuit board. Most external hard drives require the addition of a bridge circuit board to convert the hard drive's current interface into a USB interface. Samsung's N3U drive, however, uses a native USB interface and as such does not require this bridge board. This optimized design results in a smaller foot print, less power consumption and optimized performance, which is ideal for portable external storage devices. The N3U 1.8-inch drive consumes about 40 percent less power than a normal 2.5-inch hard drive of an equivalent capacity. It has two 125 GB platters for a total of 250 GB data storage capacity. The Spinpoint N3U also comes in 120 GB, 160 GB, and 200 GB capacities, the disk rotation speed is 3600 rpm. The drives are equipped with an 8 MB of cache memory. Initial shipments to OEMs are scheduled from mid-July with a MSRP of $199.00.