Hitachi 320GB 7200rpm 2.5” laptop drive received
You guessed it. Virtual machine data. I’ve been using 100 and 200GB drives for a few years but have decided not to buy anything less than 320GB now. The 100GB drives have been the work horses of my stable and have performed remarkably well. I’ve seen a lot of other folks crash drives but I’ve been extremely lucky. The vast majority of the laptop drives I’ve relied on the past 5-7 years have been Hitachi.
Sure, I have my share of Toshiba, Seagate and Western Digital laptop drives but I have grown accustomed to the Hitachi drives because they’ve always run pretty cool for me, aren’t noisy, and are fast. Fast is good when we are talking about VM performance.
So what’s so special about this drive? Well, as you can see at right, it has perfect balance. Ha! Actually, one of the reasons I purchased it was because I simply need more than 200GB of disk space in my laptop. I end up running 3-4 virtualization products on a daily basis (VPC 2007, VS 2005, Hyper-V and VMWare Workstation) so I end up with a lot of VMs and a variety of operating systems. I was really trying to hold out for a 500GB drive but got tired of playing the waiting game.
You can get the specifications for the drive at the Hitachi GST website. This drive has the SATA 3GB interface, 16MB data buffer, low power consumption and low heat (when I’m not beating it to death with I/O).
I’m planning on purchasing one of the new Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB drives when they start shipping. Right now I can’t seem to find anyone that has them in stock but I want to try one of them as well. Before you know it we’ll be able to have two 2.5” 500GB 7200rpm drives in a laptop. Nice. More toys for Christmas.
Wait till you see the “toy” I have coming in the next few weeks. Montevina baby!