A word on the 2.5″ hard drive

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The 2.5″ hard drive has become the de-facto standard in most laptops that come out onto the market these days. That’s for good reason: it’s a universal hard drive that fits just about every system, and comes in a very wide variety of makes, models, sizes, and speeds. Chances are, if you’re looking for a new hard drive for your computer, you’ll be looking for the 2.5″ model.

These drives come in a number of flavors; the most common is the SATA 2.5″ hard drive, which is just about as standard as drives get. It’s usually available in 5400 and 7200 RPM (just like your old IDE drives…remember those?), and come in just about any size you could want. The highest level SATA drives can be found in upwards of 2 terabytes, which is more than enough for the largest iTunes or anime fans out there. Let’s discuss some specific drives:

The Toshiba MK5055GSX is a very popular drive for most types of laptops; this 2.5 inch SATA hard drive is an internal device that comes with 500GB of space (again, plenty, even for gamers), an 8MB memory buffer, spins at 5400 RPM, and has a 3GB/sec transfer rate over SATA. It’s a solid hard drive from a solid company, so you can be sure that you’re getting one of the best products on the market. Better yet, you can pick one up for about $90. Long gone are the days when 500GB drives were only made in small batches and sold with price tags in the thousands. It’s a great world we live in, isn’t it?

Another 2.5″ you might want to look into is the Seagate ST9320423AS Momentus 7200.4. This drive is also SATA, and while it doesn’t have as much space as the Toshiba offering above (the Seagate “only” has 320GB), it’s faster. It’s got a 7200 RPM seek speed and 16MB buffer, which more than makes up for the difference in space when compared to the Toshiba. This Seagate also has a leg up: the price. You get the speed and most of the speed of the above drive at a lower price. Most Seagate Momentus 7200.4 models in 500GB can be found at around $70. To me, this is a better deal than the Toshiba. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with spending an extra $20 for more space, the increase in speed is great for someone who doesn’t have to have that extra bit of space for gaming or other large projects.

Stay tuned, everybody. As always if we see some more information on what you can do with 2.5″ hard drives we’ll be the first to share it!

Shopping:

OCZ Technology 60 GB Solid 2 Series Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD2-2SLD60G
Firewire 1394 + USB Hard Drive Enclosure for 2.5-inch SATA Laptop Drive, Bus-powered
Hd Enclosure Sata 2.5
Acomdata Samba USB 2.0 3.5-Inch IDE/SATA Hard Drive Enclosure SMBXXXU2E-BLK (Black)
Iomega Prestige 1.5 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive 34474

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One Response to “A word on the 2.5″ hard drive”

  1. 1TB Internal Hard Drive on November 12th, 2009 5:20 pm

    [...] don’t want to go out and buy an expensive enclosure. The Western Digital Scorpio Blue is a 2.5″ hard drive built specifically for notebooks. This is a hard drive much on the same level as the Seagate, with [...]

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