A Good Choice For Small Laptops And Ultrabooks
The Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDD turns out to be a solid 2.5” hard drive with a SATA 6Gb/s interface. Its performance is good enough for the disk to stand in as a system drive in space-constrained mobile devices. However, as we might have guessed, and the benchmarks actually show, Seagate's ST500LT032 cannot compete with the fastest 7200 RPM models when it comes to an all-out drag race.
If we had to summarize the performance of Seagate's Laptop Ultrathin HDD in one word, it'd be average. It places somewhere in the middle of the field as we flip through our charts. The only notable exception is when we start digging into power consumption, where the Laptop Ultrathin HDD draws less power than most of the field. Again, this is what you want to see from a mobility-oriented hard drive.
Fortunately for Seagate, this drive isn't being marketed as a performance-oriented solution. Its main selling point is the fact that it's only 5 mm thick, instead of the 9.5 mm most of us are used to. This thin design lets the Laptop Ultrathin HDD fit in very shallow enclosures, while still facilitating 500 GB of capacity.
All of these points make the Laptop Ultrathin HDD a particularly interesting choice for Ultrabooks, especially as Intel chases prices down. There aren't many road warriors willing to sink an extra $300 into a large SSD after dropping $600 on a laptop. In contrast, the ST500LT032 sells to builders for under $100. Yes, there is a premium over more traditional 2.5" hard drives. But when the thin form factor is a must-have for fitment reasons, the extra cost is unavoidable, really.
