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 ...
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 ...
Advantages: Small, quiet, reliable Disadvantages: Can't think of any really
I bought this particular harddrive recently to be used as backup for all my photos and music and other miscellaneous documents that I have managed to collect over the years.
Basically, mainly all external hard drives on the market today are just ordinary hard drives in an external caddy which provides power and allows you to connect it to your computer to read data. It's extremely easy to buy your own hard drive and caddy, connect them together yourself and away you go with your own customised external HDD.
A 2.5" hard drive is the size used for laptops so consequently it is smaller and more compact than a regular 3.5" drive for desktops. The SeagateST9320325AS is a SATA-300 drive which basically means it's quite fast although the regular consumer doesn't really notice the difference all that much between that and older style ...
Product Information for "Seagate Momentus 5400.4 ST9250827AS 250 GB" »
Performance
Drive Transfer Rate
300 MBps (external)
Seek Time
12 ms (average)
Average Latency
5.6 ms
Spindle Speed
5400 rpm
Reliability
Non-Recoverable Errors
1 per 10^14
Start / Stop Cycles
600,000
Miscellaneous
Works with Windows Vista
Software and devices that carry the Works with Windows Vista logo have been tested for baseline compatibility with PC's running.
Manufacturer warranty
Service & Support
3 years warranty
Service & Support Details
Limited warranty - 3 years
Environmental parameters
Min Operating Temperature
0 °C
Max Operating Temperature
60 °C
Shock Tolerance
325 g @ 2ms (operating) / 900 g @ 1ms (non-operating)
Manufacturer's product description
The Seagate Momentus 5400.4 drive offers the best combination of capacity, mobility and durability in a laptop hard drive and features reliability-boosting second-generation perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). By utilizing Seagate's second-generation PMR, the Momentus 5400.4 drive delivers unmatched capacity along with exceptional durability. And with a powerful 3-Gb/s SATA interface, this drive will be able to keep up with today's demanding digital world in mainstream laptops, workstations, gaming laptops and personal external storage.
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