Either Seagate has managed to bring their 5400RPM drives down a large amount in power usage, or they is some other technical limitation with size and speed in laptop drives, because most current tests show 7200RPM drives to take only a small percentage more energy than 5400RPM ones.

Someone care to explain this to me?

I cannot wait to purchase a Seagate Barracuda hybrid drive with 1TB of storage and 1GB of embedded flash RAM. Or 3 of them and a RAID 6 controller.

Encryption within the drive is a pretty good idea. It would seem to require a BIOS hook if it is supposed to work prior to OS boot, however.

Could do a lot to curb all those cases of identity theft because somebody lost a laptop or had it stolen. On the other hand, it'll probably be popular with the child porn scum as well.

Man, Seagate sure seems to be leading the hard drive industry these days...

...are perpindicular drives slightly faster than latitudal ones? I mean, the bits are closer together and thus, the drive head should have to travel a shorter distance to access the same amount of data...