Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ST9160821AS 160 GB

Advantages: Huge capacity, reasonably fast, 5 year warranty
Disadvantages: Not the fastest

...battery life - if you're spinning it faster, the battery life will suffer, badly. After a quick search I came across the Seagate. The capacity is huge compared to most laptop drives at 160Gb. This is as a result of a fairly new technology called perpendicular recording which allows the drive to write data vertically in the disk magnetic layer as opposed to across it. This gives the possibility for much more storage space than traditional non perpendicular drives. The price was also ridiculously cheap (that or I've not being paying attention to 2.5inch drive prices recently). If I'm honest, I was also unaware that perpendicular recording had made it to laptops so there was an element of the 'new and cool technology' in the buying equation. The drive spins at 5600RPM which ought to make it quicker but it should also be quicker still because... Read review

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Advantages: Speedy, High Capacity, Quite, good customer support
Disadvantages: Requires a bit more power than other laptop drives.

...If you are looking for a good hard disk for your laptop you are looking at the right line of Hard disk from Seagate, the Seagate Momentus is one of the best laptop hard disks out there, I have been using one for some time now and have had it never go wrong, the only down side to the disk the power consumption of it is around 1 amp (5 watts) usually and for most low end disks it is usually around 0.5 amps (2.5 watts), but this is down to the speed of which the disk spins at, a staggering 7200 RPM, for a laptop hard disk this is fast, as most hard disk for laptops only work at ether 4200 RPM or 5400 RPM. Since this hard disk has such a fast spindle, it means that it can read and write like 'Billy Stink' (old expression!) The price for this disk isn't too bad considering that you are getting a high speed, high capacity disk that is nearly... Read review

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Advantages: Small, fast, large cache
Disadvantages: Expensive

...times. So overall it performs well. Seagate are a trusted manufacturer and have been around for a while. As far as I'm aware they have never made a bad device line, but then my HDD's of preference are normally Western digital. The device uses an 8mb cache, this isn't a special as it used to be since many other 2.5"HDDs now use this amount but its still a plus point for the device. It runs a 7200RPM, this is about the same as many normal 3.5" HDDs but is quite fast for a laptop variant. As I said before it is important to look at your need for this type of device, there are many other devices available that do the same job but for a far lower price. You should only buy 2.5" HDD's if you really need one and if you can't use anything else. I bought this one new from Ebuyer for just over £100 inc VAT and delivery. Its now happily running... Read review

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