Seagate Momentus 7000.2

Seagate wasn’t the first to the 7,200rpm mark, but that hasn’t stopped it from making the fastest hard drive around. The Momentus 7200.2 has a well-deserved reputation as the notebook hard-drive performance king. What you give up in space, you gain in speed—the Momentus easily eclipses the ginormous Western Digital Scorpio in read speed, access time, and all around zippiness. (Seagate has announced but not shipped a 200GB version of this drive.)

Although the Scorpio didn’t lag too far behind in average reads, the drive’s spindle speed kept its access time about 25 percent slower than the Momentus’s. The Momentus also had a 22 percent advantage in PCMark05’s application tests.

Certain Momentus models feature a G-Force Protection sensor that can tell if the drive is in free fall and quickly park the heads to avoid damaging the drive. While the sexy-fast Mtron SSD will grab the spotlight, the majority of folks looking to upgrade their notebooks will reach for either the Western Digital or Seagate models.

We lean toward the Seagate Momentus because of its speed advantage and killer five-year warranty. Its free-fall sensor also makes us feel warm and fuzzy about data integrity and seals the deal.