Those of you who know me will know that about two years or so ago, I made the transition from being a desktop user into the realms of the laptop oriented. Things are pretty cool in notebook land - I can take my machine with me all over the place, since it's no longer chained to my desk at home. I can go over to friends and play some mp3s by connecting my laptop to their amp. I can meet pals in a coffee shop and have a chat about some PERL code. I can catch up on the latest ep of Security Now! on the train to work. Oh, and the best bit.... I can now surf the Net at home sitting on the sofa, rather than sitting in front of a desk, which is certainly appreciated by my ass, I can assure you.
But not all is perfect in laptop land. For one, I find myself constantly checking how much battery life I have left. And often, it's not a lot. Try to do just about anything demanding, and just watch that juice fade away.
My major gripe, though, is hard disk space - or lack thereof. As just about all of our readers will know, hard drive space is one thing you just can't seem to have enough of. In these days of mp3s, divx and all sorts of other media formats, not to mention software just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, the more hard disk space you have the better. But laptops are notorious for lacking this. Nevermind - good old Seagate has a solution at hand.
Rob Williams of Techgage.com has written a review of the new Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB Mobile HDD. And what a little beast it is. Packing an 8MB cache, with sustained internal transfer rates of 44MB/s, and with an average seek time of 12ms, the 5400.3 160GB is a blessing to the mobile user. 160GB, although not in the same league as the almost half terabyte offerings now available to desktop users, is certainly a hell of a lot better than the 30, 60 and 80 GB drives being shipped in the majority of today's notebooks.
The Momentus 5400.3 is one of the coolest pieces of hardware I've been able to review lately. Despite it's size, it packs quite a huge punch. 160GB is finally possible in your laptop, and Seagate are to be commended for being the first ones to make them commercially available. After a few quick e-tailer searches, I was unable to find any mobile drive at 160GB except for this one.