Seagate Momentus 5400.6 ST9320325AS 320 GB > Reviews (1)

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 Seagate ST9320325AS 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 IDE drives. One of the main differences is the connector cables, which are smaller and tidier and easier to plug in.

I bought my Seagate drive from ebuyer.com and it cost £42.57 including VAT and shipping for 320GB, which is roughly 13p per gigabyte of storage. As I'm paranoid about losing my entire collection of MP3's (16GB and counting) and digital photo albums (25GB and rising fast) I thought this drive was an essential purchase. If you bought this hard drive to install into a laptop you would lose some space due to the operating system but I still think 320GB is quite a lot, and for the average laptop user it is more than adequate.

Obviously if you have thousands of high resolution photographs and high quality MP3's then you would need to buy a larger capacity drive but otherwise this is a very good price for the amount of storage that you get.

The drive itself is quite quiet, not overly noisy like some other hard drives I've had and I sometimes forget that it's connected to my desktop. It seems to run quite cool as well, after it has been on for a while it doesn't get overly hot which is always a good sign. It appears to be stable, with 6GB of data files copying in just under 20 minutes, and I've had no corrupt files at all.

Overall I really like this hard drive - it's fast, quiet and reliable which I think is essential when buying any computer part. If you want to back up your important files and data then this hard drive is a good choice.