Seagate's 160GB 2.5-Inch Hard Drive for Laptops

neutron_p writes "Seagate Technology today announced the world's first 2.5-inch disc drive built on perpendicular recording technology. New Seagate hard drive measures 160GB which is 25% more than the largest capacity notebook drive currently available. What's more, the drive features hardware-based full disc encryption security."

And we only ask your first born!!!!

[1967mustangman]

Laptop harddrives are still insanely expensive as far as I am concerned. They are more in the $2.50 - $3 a gig range instead of the $.25-$.33 price range for a desktop hdd. Maybe this can help change this. Eventually. Maybe.

Re:And we only ask your first born!!!!

[tomstdenis]

Laptop drives cost more because they're smaller. They have to invest more R&D to get the storage/speed in the ballpark as desktop HDs. Also they probably have more waste in the manufacturing process given the BPI is much higher.

Just my 0.02$...

Though to be fair most drives aren't that bad. My seagate 40GB for my laptop cost all of 90$ which isn't really out of the question given it's laptop, not a file store. The drive is reasonably fast and unlike the 600$ hitachi drive that Compaq sells as a "re

Re:And we only ask your first born!!!!

[superpulpsicle]

I have yet to see a laptop HD that runs equal speed with a desktop HD.

Re:And we only ask your first born!!!!

[tomstdenis]

They're faster than a flash drive ... good enough for me...

Fuck I run gentoo on my laptop which means I build everything from source... and it's not a drag.

Again it's about knowing what to expect. I don't expect to see 500GB of storage with GiB/sec read throughput from a laptop...

Tom

Re:And we only ask your first born!!!!

[tomstdenis]

Why? have you tried Gentoo? Have you tried more than one distro? Have you tried anything other than Windows?

I have.

And it's about choice anyways, not about being "better" as an absolute. Knoppix is fine for quite a few "use cases" [and so are the BSD series]. In my case Gentoo was better for me.

But I guess you think you're all hip and righteous because your install of windows is going smoothly [*]

Tom

[*] Typical definition of smoothly for windows is less than 90% memory/cpu usage with zero intentio

Re:And we only ask your first born!!!!

[Metasquares]

Granted, Gentoo's performance on a laptop is acceptable, but it's nowhere near the level that you will get on an equivalent desktop machine. I was planning on switching distros on my laptop until I found out about quickpkg (compile on desktop, quickpkg, emerge -K from laptop with desktop as PKGHOST).

Perpendicular

[Shook18]

A non-technical, school house rockish explanation of perpendicular storage. Pretty entertaining. http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html [hitachigst.com]

hardware encryption of hard drives scares me

[artifex2004]

Especially if it can't be locked out [slashdot.org].

Re:hardware encryption of hard drives scares me

[darkwhite]

You are an idiot.

First, hard drives are not encrypted. They are password-protected. The controller accepts the password once at startup and does not deny access again until powered down.

Second, the user controls the password protection. Why would you be scared about an option you can turn on and off?

Third, hard drive encryption is the most durable option a user has for protecting their data short of encrypting their files with strong software encryption. It therefore greatly enhances users' ability to pr