Okay, Samsung didn’t really come up with the first 1TB 2.5-inch drive for notebooks (Western Digital first reached 1TB limit with the Scorpio Blue almost exactly a year ago), but the Spinpoint MT2 is Samsung’s first 2.5-inch drive to hit the 1TB limit. Not that it’s information that consumers like you and me would care about, mind you – we don’t really care who came first now, do we? But we do care about which 1TB drive is better.
To that end, Samsung is claiming that the Spinpoint MT2 is 20% faster and uses 4% less power than WD’s Scorpio Blue, although in a non-standard shell (it’s a bit thicker than the usual 2.5-incher) that limits it to certain notebook models and devices with a SATA or SATA II interface.
Hitachi just introduced the Travelstar Z7K320, a 320GB mobile hard drive for notebooks that carves out its name not with capacity (which is pretty average), but with a really slim, 7mm profile that should help pave the way for even slimmer notebook designs.
Before we get to the promised awesomeness of Seagate’s new hybrid drive for laptops, let’s get into laptop storage basics. Traditional hard disk drives (HDD) will give you the best price-per-gigabyte storage ratio, although they’re considerably slower than solid state drives. SSD on the other hand, come with a lower storage ceiling and are much more expensive, but offer faster performance, are more robust and energy-efficient—thanks mainly to the absence of moving parts. Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what this drive is all about: Seagate managed to merge SSD and HDD tech into the Momentus XT’s 2.5-inch frame, making for a laptop drive that’s cheaper than SSDs, faster than HDDs, and with a storage ceiling that tops off at 500GBs.
Samsung has just raised the ante for notebook storage by coming out with the Spinpoint MP4, a fast 2.5-inch drive with a capacity that tops out at 640GBs. While 640GB drives have been out for some time now, this drive’s most notable feature would be the 7200rpm motor—an improvement over standard 5400rpm notebook drives.
For people who want storage performance, solid state drives are the way to go. But with SSDs still costing around an arm and a leg plus a few strands of facial hair per Gigabyte, the good old hard drive is still the standard. But for people, nay, enthusiasts who want the best performance—which means going over the standard 7200rpm speeds on most hard drives today—without being stuck with the 128 to 256GB caps on SSDs, you shop for WD’s 10,000rpm VelociRaptor.
