What's the best 160gb hard drive?

[todd1010]

Thinking about ditching my 100gb and going with a 160gb. I've the the Seagate drive now, that I paid $179 for about a year ago. I was recently at my local CompUSA and was just compairing some notebook hard drives. I noticed that my Seagate hard drive was still about the same price, but there was another brand (don't remember the name) but it was quite a bit more expensive.

I asked what was up with that drive and he said it was a lot faster than the Seagate drive. Is the Phatbox capable of handling a faster drive or should I even bother with getting a faster drive.

[markbowen]

There are only two 2.5 inch 160GB drives on the market now, from Seagate and Hitachi.  They are both 5400rpm/8MB drives.  The Hitachi has a faster seek time by 1.5 milliseconds -- but the Seagate has a five year warranty compared to three for Hitachi.  So stick with the Seagate.

[S80_UK]

Hi,

Mark's reply came in while I was typing this...

I took a quick look at the specs to compare against the Seagate drive, and there is very little to choose.  The have the same rotational speed, the same cache size, and the same interface speeds.  At the extremes there may be a few differences, but I doubt they would make any difference at all in the Phatbox application.

As Mark says, warranty may be more significant, although in practice, three of five years is probably academic.

[sbingner]

Even if it were faster, that would be of minimal use.... it doesn't take much speed to read an MP3.  The only place it could be of use is in copying files to the DMS, but I found the Seagate drive to be VERY reliable when I was testing it... I'd stick with that