Hi All: I've decided to get a 7200 RPM drive fo

[Hamonstage]

Hi All:
I've decided to get a 7200 RPM drive for my TC4200. Is mine Ultra 100 ATA and not PATA? If anyone know which model I need to get and can post that would be awesome. I know it's not SATA. Any store in Canada I ahould buy the drive from? I know Future shop and Best Buy don't carry it.
thx,
Hammy

[Sergei]

I was all excited there for a minute! This is the first I heard of 7200rpm 2.5" drives. But a quick skim-search leads me to believe you're Ultra ATA/100, (as am I) and the 7200 drives all seem to be SATA.

Which is annoying. Is there a good technical reason for the interface to limit the spin speed, or is it just a market and manufacturing volume thing?

[paulo_andre]

that's not true!! I have a seagate momentus 7200rpm 80GB on my TC4200. In fact most SATA hard drives still don't have enough speed to require SATA (therefore more than 100Mb/s of PATA), so there is little difference (I'm not talking about NCQ, that is a huge improvement only present on SATA hard drives). There have been 7200rpm 2.5'' hard drives for a long time now, but the most common are SATA, since only now some laptops come with them and since they are new, they must come with the new interface. However, it is still possible to order an ATA/PATA 7200 rpm 2.5'' drive. All you have to do is search a little bit. Also, the correct name is PATA - parallel ATA (in contrast with SATA - serial ATA), but PATA was usually called only ATA since there was no other interface at the time. Now, since there is SATA, stores had to put the full name to show the difference

[Sergei]

I think re-christening the old interface causes more confusion... But I'm glad I was wrong about the availability of parallel 7200rpm drives.

Do you find it reduces battery life by much?

[paulo_andre]

no, I didn't notice any significant power drain. However I did notice a huge increase in speed. Now I highly recommend them.