On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 22:17 (-0800), Ardell Faul wrote:

> For what it's worth, I see a lot of failed hard drives in the laptop
> repair business, and my experience has been that the drives most prone
> to fail are the ones over 100Gbyte. In fact, I don't think I have ever
> had to replace a drive in the 40 to 80 Gbyte range. And almost without
> exception, the drives I see in laptops almost never have anything like
> even 40 gbytes of data in them. Anybody who downloads and carrys around
> 160 Gbytes worth of important data in a laptop is being foolish. Very
> foolish. They are just asking for it, and they usually get it. I don't
> understand why anybody would even WANT to put a very large hard drive in
> a laptop. If you want to collect a lot of music or video, an external
> backup drive or a desktop drive is a much more sane choice. It is just
> plain stupid to carry around a laptop with a lot of data stored in the
> hard drive. One slip of the hand, or a good solid thump under the area
> where the hard drive is, and you can kiss all your data goodbye.

> I guess it is the Geek Squad blurb, you know--put in a 160 Gbyte hard
> drive, 2 gigs of memory, and flash the BIOS and you will have a
> screaming machine.

> What a bunch of shit that is.

Your reply is neither helpful nor well-thought out. Just because
someone has a large drive in their laptop does not mean that they
don't have it backed up somewhere, so your assumption that they will
lose all their data if their disk goes kaput is just silly.

Second, Kris didn't say his data is important.

Third, the point of having a laptop is mobility. There is no point in
having a laptop if you have to carry around your desktop or external
drives to get at your data.

Or maybe I'm just a foolish person, like almost everyone I know who
uses their laptop as their primary computing platform.


> kiyer25 wrote:

>> Hi all,

>> My 80 GB 7200 rpm internal hard drive (hitachi) died (just 3 year and 1
>> month). I would like to buy a internal hard drive which is reliable and
>> best one with reasonable price as well.

>> I am looking for 160 GB with 5400 or 7200 hard drive.

>> It is IDE 2.5, ata 100, 8MB buffer. Really appreciate suggestion and
>> any inputs to buy a new approbriate internal hard drive for my DELL800.

>> Thanks a lot

Kris (and other apparently foolish people :-)

I put a Seagate Momentus ST9320421AS 320 GB 7200 RPM disk in my laptop
a few months ago, and I have no complaints. This was a "state of the
art" disk when I bought it, but it wouldn't surprise me that it is now
last week's news.

I see that Hitachi has dropped the price on their 320 GB 7200 RPM
laptop drive (e.g, HTS723232L9A360 in their 7K320 series) to under
$100 here in Canada; YMMV. (I might have picked that one had it been
available at the time I bought this disk (May or June, for nearly
twice that price!).)

Fujitsu also has an offering, MHZ2320BJ.

All of these disks are very similar is performance and power
consumption specs (as near as I can tell: they use different ways of
specifying some of the specs). They all have 16 MB buffers and 300
MB/sec data transfer rates (interface, not media).

Seagate had a 5 year warranty, Fujitsu was 3 years, I don't have the
info for Hitachi.

WD also made a 320 GB 7200 drive, but there was something about it I
didn't like (possibly performance was lower).


Someone (Fujitsu?) announced a 500 GB drive some time around June, but
it was only a 5400 RPM drive. For me, speed was more important than
the extra space (320 is plenty for me), but you may have a different
viewpoint.

There are variations on the models, some including built-in
encryption, others with G-force sensors, others with blah blah blah.
But trying to find those extra features at your favourite discount
parts store may be tricky.

Anyway, you should be able to find something you like at a reasonable
price.

Cheers.
Jim