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, Value for Money, Quiet, 5yr warranty Disadvantages: none that i know
to transfer data between pc's without using a network, or for backup storage on many pc's. Also with external hard drives from seagate you only get a 1yr warranty, instead of 5yrs for internal drives like this one.
The formatted usable size is 298gb, not 320gb, it is very quiet I do not notice it at all. It is lightning fast thanks to its 16mb cache which helps make windows and programs load up quicker.
The downside with the low price I paid was that as it was OEM (original equipment manufacturer) hard drive, this means that it is for computer manufactures and the hard drive is the only item incuded, so there is no instruction manual, or the sata cable to connect your hard drive to the motherboard. I had to buy the cable seperatly, but this was only a couple of quid. However nnon OEM drives come with the cable included.
Although no ...
Product Information for "Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST9320421AS 320 GB" »
Performance
Drive Transfer Rate
300 MBps (external)
Internal Data Rate
80 MBps
Seek Time
11 ms (average)
Average Latency
4.17 ms
Spindle Speed
7200 rpm
Reliability
MTBF
500,000 hour(s)
Non-Recoverable Errors
1 per 10^14
Start / Stop Cycles
600,000
Miscellaneous
Compatible with Windows 7
"Compatible with Windows 7" software and devices carry Microsoft’s assurance that these products have passed tests for compatibility and reliability with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7.
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 7200.3 drive - the industry's highest-performing 7200-RPM laptop hard drive - delivers performance, small size and mobility to all users. Available with G-Force Protection, this drive also offers added durability and robustness in the event of the accidental drops that can occur in strenuous mobile environments. The Seagate Momentus 7200.3 laptop hard drives are perfect for mainstream and performance laptops, workstations and small form factor PCs.
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