Advantages: Small, quiet, reliable Disadvantages: Can't think of any really
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 ...
Advantages: Huge capacity, reasonably fast, 5 year warranty Disadvantages: Not the fastest
My laptop, a Dell 5150 is a fine machine (see review elsewhere on Ciao) but the 80Gb hard drive whilst big for a laptop is starting to get a bit cramped now I have both Windows XP and Vista on it so I've started looking around for a second hard drive so I can put Vista on one and leave XP on the other and then swap drives as needed. Luckily, following a previous hard drive failure, I have a spare caddy that the laptop needs so swapping drives would be a quick task, assuming I keep the tiny screwdriver needed handy in my rucksack!
Laptop hard drives are smaller than normal - 2.5inch as opposed to 3.5 inch and tend to be at a price premium compared to the 'normal' sized drives, especially the bigger ones. They also tend to be much slower as they run at 4200RPM instead of 5600 or even 7200RPM that desktop ones run at. The reason being ...
Advantages: Fast, Quiet and Efficient Disadvantages: None
some quiet, relaxing music.
As for efficiency, the SeagateMomentus added another 25 minutes of battery life onto that of my IBM ThinkPad T21, from 3 hours 50, all the way to 4 hours and 5 minutes! The old 20GB Fujitsu disk must have really been guzzling some juice to use 25 minutes of power!
After having the drive for a few days I have decided not to get the 100GB disk as I have become so attached to the Momentus.
It truly is the most perfectly balanced laptop drive on the market today, so if you're in a buying decision, just don't think about it and BUY ONE! I promise you will never look back! ...
Product Information for "Seagate Momentus 5400 FDE.3 ST9320329AS 320 GB" »
Hard drive
Form Factor
2.5" x 1/8H
Capacity
320 GB
Interface Type
Serial ATA-300
Buffer Size
8 MB
Features
QuietStep, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), Ramp Load, Hardware Full Disk Encryption (FDE), Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), Seagate Secure
Performance
Drive Transfer Rate
300 MBps (external)
Internal Data Rate
103.8 MBps
Average Latency
5.6 ms
Spindle Speed
5400 rpm
Reliability
Non-Recoverable Errors
1 per 10^14
Start / Stop Cycles
600,000
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
350 g @ 2ms (operating) / 1000 g @ 1ms (non-operating)
Manufacturer's product description
The Seagate Momentus 5400.3 FDE drive delivers large capacity of secure digital storage. The drive's Seagate Secure technology protects data against loss or theft on the road, in the office and in the data center, and ensures the secure disposal and repurposing of drives.
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