Advice please - which new laptop drive?

[MSIC]

Am getting increasingly fed up with the relatively poor performance of my HP DM1's 250GB 5400 rpm laptop hard drive, and want a new one.
Capacity is not a big issue, since mostly it's for internet browsing, and i hook up to my NAS to stream media / save documents etc.

It is running Win 7 (currently 64bit), plus Ubuntu 10.10 dual booted (more precisely its via Wubi currently as an extended test, but it will be uninstalled then properly dual-booted with the new drive).

Budget - not absolutely fixed, although the £50 area feels alot nicer than the £100 area.

I want the best of all worlds (naturally) and dont want my currently great battery life to be reduced (as much as can be helped), but recognise that a 7200 speed drive will affect it a little, however figure that keeping to one or two platters should help. That said, i'm not sure how many platters the following drives have.

My options seem to be the following:
2.5" HDD's
250GB Seagate Momentus XT 7200rpm £33.51
320GB Western Dig Scorpio Black 2.5", £41.10
500GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 2.5" £49.82

Hybrid
Seagate Momentus XT 320GB £75.09 (SR review)

SSD's
OCZ Vertex MLC 60GB on Today Only for £88.11
Corsair 60GB Force Series MLC the same price.

After some soul-searching, i'm leaning towards the hybrid Momentus.
Any thoughts are welcome before i commit my hard-earned cash

[Sputnik]

I would say buy the SSD and it will be worth it! but, Only based on the fact you said you don't need lots of storage space, You don't want to impact on the battery life and you want FAST.

I can't comment on the other drives, My laptop is soo old it has a 60Gb PATA drive with a tranfer speed of about 20Mb/s.

[MSIC]

http://www.storagereview.com/corsair...120_ssd_review
That does sound tempting indeed...
My dilemma then would be that I know I would want to upgrade my desktop too

[alpha channel]

As Sputnik says the SSD would be the best choice from a performance/power perspective though dual booting on a 60GB drive might be a bit of a squeeze (even though Ubuntu doesn't exactly take up reams of space).

The 320GB WD Scorpio Black's quite a good drive, I fitted that exact one to my XPS1530 not long after the drive came out (replacing a 250GB 5400rpm drive with Vista on it ) and the system isn't at all sluggish with quick application access, even Poser 6, which has quite a long load time, matches my desktop system (a 1TB 7200.12 and XP Pro64) and snappy file access (battery life isn't great but I'd probably get better battery life out of it if I didn't run it full tilt all the time ).

[Pob255]

I agree with alpha channel here, an SSD makes a lot of sense in laptops, not only in terms of performance but also in terms of lower power draw and no moving parts so very resistant to shock damage (you'd need an impact hard enough to crack the pcb)

The downside is of course the price, it's a shame we've only really seen big jumps in terms of performance in SSD if someone came up with a far cheaper lower performance SSD (ie something equal to or only slightly better than a hard drive) it would be ideal for laptops.

I seem to remember considering the Seagate Momentus XT until I read that there has been lots of issues with it, even when they don't break they seem to quickly lose speed and after just a couple of months of use they are performing worse than other hard drives.

the scorpio Black is a lovely drive, not the cheapest but a great performer, I've put a couple in laptops as replacements.
I've also got for the free fall versions, again I like shock protection in laptops esp if you carry/move them about a lot in a non-shutdown state, although it does push the price up slightly.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/160-g...mb-cache-12-ms

[MSIC]

After further reading (and trying to buy the Corsair on Scan's Today Only, which is currently not working), I am now considering the Kingston 64GB SSDNow V100, specifically the notebook bundle version (comes with case & cable to make the old HDD into an external drive) plus Acronic DVD (which i'd probably still use Ghost instead).

Ebuyer has it currently for £84.99.

Cons are that it's a slower write than the Corsair, although considering my current 5400 HDD it'll be replacing i dont think i'll mind...
Pros are that it's cheaper (a bit), it's available (Scan's links dont work), it's another 4GB (at these capacities, it all counts!) and the bundle.

Reviews i've googled are all positive, although they are reviews in isolation rather than comparisons.
Any further thoughts are welcome, before i buy.

[Sputnik]

You will still notice it being alot faster than a Laptop hard drive, Even though it does not have the speed of the other SSD drives.

There are a few people on here with Kingston SSD's.

[MSIC]

Bought the Kingston SSD in the end, with the laptop kit.
Seems like a good price.
Cheers all.

[Pob255]

Let us know how it turns out.

[vicar]

I am sure you will see a marked diff with the SSd; booting time should increase; it should run much cooler and with a longer battery life to boot.