Enthusiast 2.5" HDDs: Speed or Capacity?

I hate when there's a review that only covers part of the market...

"the enthusiast space offers two choices for high-end users: you can either get a 7,200 RPM drive at a maximum capacity of 160 GB, or get as much as 250 GB storage capacity with 5,400 RPM drive performance."

What about the *7200RPM 200GB* HITACHI Travelstar 7K200 ????

Given the Hitachi, it seems like mentioning that, for a price (~$250), the debate in your article's moot.

And what about the 5400RPM HITACHI Travelstar 5K250?

That's exactly why I register this forum just to post this comment.
Where isn't HITACHI Travelstar 7K200 in your article? I don't think you don't know the existence of the 7k200. It's simply the fastest in the market by far. Even if they don't send you a sample, you can just go buy one, it's available in US for 1 or 2 months already.

"you can either get a 7,200 RPM drive at a maximum capacity of 160 GB" WRONG

I too was wondering why they ignored the 7k200 - it's out there...

While they are not a big part of the market yet, it would be good to see some 1.8 inch drives move up in capacity, I use both a Sony UX and a Fujitsu P1610 for mobile use, and it is extremely frustrating trying to install applications on drives that are only 30-60GB. I already carry an external drive for my own files, but 30GB is only enough for a handful of apps besides the windows OS.

I hope in the next year or two things will get better.

Quote:

"Serial ATA offers more robust cabling and a higher interface bandwidth (150 or 300 MB/s as opposed to 100 MB/s with UltraATA/100)."


Question:
Do americans, or wherever the reviewer lives, have different cables than we europeans? Cause I can't recall a time where pata cables were as unreliable as sata. When switching hardware often or moving the computers often, one will notice that sometimes sata drives don't work afterwards. Because those damned cables don't have any clip or other feature to mount them securely. I know that some highend cables like those that came with my ga-p35-ds4 have clips now, but none of the sata drivers I've seen support those, and I am yet to see a power supply with a similar clip on the power cable. I've switched all my sata power cables for regular molex, cause they don't fall out again. Also the molex ones aren't as fragile. It is VERY easy to break a sata power plug if you were to pull the cable up or down (as opposed to directly back), which happends often if you're using more than one drive in a cramped chassis and want to hide the cables. For instance the antec sonata 3 or similar.


In short, I haven't EVER seen a sata cable that is more robust than their predecessor. Are they different in the us?

No, same crap.

Um... I'm guessing that conclusion also didn't mean to say "and 250 GB desktop drives such as the Samsung Spinpoint M5S." but rather notebook/laptop.