Samsung has announced that it has paved the way for laptops to come with upto 1TB hard drives following an announcement at CES in Las Vegas.

The South Korean company has announced the development of its new Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive, the world’s first 500GB 2.5-inch hard drive that fits in the industry’s standard 9.5mm height dimension of laptops.

The news means that mainstream laptops, including those from Samsung can now support capacity of up to one terabyte of storage by installing two Spinpoint M6 500GB drives.

Samsung’s new Spinpoint M6 500GB consists of three 166GB platters in a 2.5-inch hard disk drive frame measuring just 9.5mm in height.

The Spinpoint M6 500GB hard drive features a 5400rpm spindle speed, a 8MB cache, and 3.0Gbps SATA interface.

What does all this size mean? According to Samsung, you could store 160,000 digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies, or 60 hours of high definition video images on one 500GB drive.

Samsung’s Spinpoint M6 500GB is expected to be available in March 2008.