March of the notebook hard drives

I've always complained about the fact that notebook hard drives are the only technology that don't seem to keep up with Moore's Law, but that appears to be changing. A rash of recent 2.5-inch hard drive announcements shows promise that the trend of small, slow notebook drives could be changing in the near future.

MacBooks and MacBook Pros use Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives as opposed to PowerBooks and iBooks which use slower Parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives. Also MacBooks and MBPs can only accommodate a maximum drive height of 9.5mm, so the fatter 12mm drives are out.

Some of the recently announced mobile SATA HDDs include:

• Seagate Momentus 7200.2 - 160GB, 7200RPM
• Samsung Spinpoint MP1 - 200GB, 7200RPM
• Western Digital WD2500BEVS - 250GB, 5400RPM

I'm all about the new Western Digital bad boy because it's just the right combination of capacity and speed and it beats the pants off my pokey Toshiba MK2035GSS (200GB, 4200RPM). The problem is that none of the new speedy drive are shipping in quantity yet.

So my question to you, fair reader, is:

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