A whole month after I first ordered my new hard drive for my laptop, it arrives. First the whole palaver with DABS (see my previous post), then a bit of a wait with Misco because, for some reason, it must be hard to get hold of. Ah well, it’s here now, and it’s rather nice.

This is rather a special laptop hard drive. First of all, it’s 7200RPM, which was previously reserved to the desktop world. It’s not very easy to spin two round bits of metal at 7200RPM in a box that is 70mm wide and 9.5mm tall. To add to that, because it’s a laptop drive you need to try and keep the heat and power consumption down. Well, Hitachi have managed such a feat, and it’s powering my laptop.

The main reason I got this drive was because my old 40GB drive simply didn’t have the capacity to deal with what I carry around, and just didn’t give me the breathing room I needed to do those extra tasks I often did. The leap to 100GB solved that problem instantly and I now have plenty of spare space.

Once I knew I was after an upgrade, I looked around for reviews of drives and my old favourite sites, Storage Review, had their first Notebook Drive Roundup. Perfect timing! After a good read over the article, I chose the Hitachi 7K100 as the drive for me.

The bonus of 1.7× the RPM and an 8MB buffer really help bring my computer up to date. Mac OS X boots up in record time, and applications start up noticeably faster. The only downside I’ve noticed so far is that it’s slightly hotter than my previous drive, and definitely louder. Fortunately the heat isn’t too much of a problem, and I must admit I find the metallic clatter quite reassuring.

So all in all, it was £130 well spent and worth the wait, even though it was very frustrating.