[Eugene]

The notebook-oriented hard drive industry stands upon a cusp as manufacturers prepare next-generation units to hit the channel. In the mean time, 160 GB units have become a "sweet spot" of sorts when it comes to high-capacity, affordable 2.5" drives. Join us as we compare 4 160-gig units from Seagate, Hitachi, and WD with results drawn from our original notebook drive roundup. These units span the PATA and SATA interface as well as the 5400 and 7200 RPM spindle speeds and represent both units available for purchase today as well as a baseline that the drives of tomorrow want to beat.

160 GB Notebook Drive Roundup

[continuum]

The 7200.2 looks surprisingly good, as does the 5K160.

I've been trying to spec only 7200rpm drives in my personal laptops for a while-- the capacity bumps we're seeing now will be nice.

[chriska]

I'm a little bit suspicious about the noise benchmark. The results are very different from what I would expect (e.g. 7200rpm drives more quiet than 5400 rpm drives), also a distance of 3mm may produce bad results, because the drives may emit different sound characteristics in different directions. An update of the article with sound measured from 50cm distance in a dampened box would be very welcome.

[Spod]

You might just get your wish - elsewhere on the forum, Eugene's mentioned that he's looking into updating the sound measuring tools SR uses. Maybe not on SPCR's scale, but as good as he can get it on this site's budget. You can expect an article revisiting some recent and popular drives when that comes to fruition. I can't say which drives he'll choose to re-examine, though.

[Marli]

Hi,

I have a question. I have both Seagate 7200.2 (80gb only) and Hitachi 5k160 (160gb). During idle time, both of them are quiet. However, when I am booting up, opening a directory etc. I dont hear Seagate drive (only a little whining sound when im doing virus scan), but I hear every seek/read/write (trr trr) of the Hitachi noise (I hardly can hear my fans). Is this normal? I couldn't see any information about the drives operating loudness levels.

Thanks
Marli