Is there any difference in the heat generated by these drives? I would be concerned that upgrading to one of these drives might cause overheating on my laptop... thanks for a great article!

It will be a cold day in hell before I ever spend more than $100 on any hard drive, mobile or desktop. Yes, I'm cheap.

thanks for the review.

i'm surprised you didn't include a toshiba drive in the mix especially given their presence in the laptop hard drive world.

kinda of reminds me of your power supply review (that you reference in this review). in that review you did not include a power supply from pc power & cooling (pcpc). pcpc is considered by many to be the gold standard in power supplies.

when you folks choose products for a category comparison do you consider it important to at least include all of the most significant players in the category you are reviewing?

comparison reviews that are comprehensive are *much* more useful than comparison reviews that omit particular competitors.

to the author of this review specifically, did you consider adding a toshiba product to your comparison and if so why not?

peace,
david

I just love it when I do my research & buy a product that rocks. It's even better when the next month TR puts it through the gauntlet and it wins Editors Choice.

7200.1 FTW!!

I wouldn't mind getting a k7200 or whatever that was to replace the 60gb 5400rpm in here. It bogs down way too easily. Maybe that's just the swapping from 512mb of ram? *shrug*

Hmm. I think my new D820 will take a SATA drive (Dell site says it will) is there a SATA version of the Seagate 7200? or other recomendation for a nice SATA for this machine?

More and more, I'm itching to try a Seagate. I've heard nothing but good things from them...

digg it:

http://digg.com/hardware/Seven_Mobile_ATA_Hard_Drives_Compared_-_Th...

Good article, would've been nice to throw in a regular desktop drive for a comparison though. Only other one that I've seen like that was at storagereview.com, and the fastest laptop drive they had at the time was about 30% slower than a regular desktop hard drive, but that review is a little old now...

hmmm very interesting.

For about a year I've been thinking about replacing the 20GB IBM Travelstar 40GN in my laptop (4200RPM 2MB cache) and this review has made me think.

Last year I bought a WD Scorpio 400VE but that was a big mistake. At times it would just go into fits of recalibraion that would last about 5 mins, it would make the whole machine jerk as it clicked along. I keep it in my USB2 hd enslosure as the recalibration doesn't bother just saving files but I won't be buying another Scorpio (shame as I like WD's desktop drives).

Anyway, that Seagate 5400.2 looks very good, and at about £46 for the 40GB version (all I really need) it could be my next choice.

BTW Excellent review as ever :-)

dang. i was hoping for a samsung drive in there as well- i love their desktop drives, i wonder if their laptop ones are just as good...

I've been using WD for ages, but Seagate won me over about 2 years ago. I've no complaints form a 5400.2 and a 7200.9. *thumbs up*
Great review as always.

Excellent review.
Seagate FTW!

I have a 100GB 5400.2 and it was a great update for 4 + year old Dell 8100. Lots of quiet, fast storage for my lappy and a 5 year warranty.
I want to get a second one for my hot swap bay so I can have 200GB storage on the go.

I think I paid around $95, which was awsome.
I would have gotten a 7200RPM drive for the same money, but it wasnt worth losing 40% of my capacity.

And as someone who went from a 4200rpm/2mb to 7200rpm/8mb laptop hard drive the difference is huge. It used to lag considerably doing simple things like opening Firefox but now, coupled with a gig of RAM, it it never loses reponsivness.

And second having an 'old' hard drive as a reference point, these test figures are not much use to many without a baseline to compare from. And its good to see my dollars are well spent :)

Thank you for including the baseline 'old slow' drive.
Too many time I see these comparisons of whatever hardware and all you see is fairly new stuff. I want to know how much better the new hotness is vs. the old n busted I currently have. That's much more interesting than seeing 4 pieces of new gear that are all still within 5% performance of each other.