I got my first touch with a computer during the 386 era in my school computer class. I was being exposed to the basic programming (BASIC) and gaming from a 5.5" Floppy Disk drive. My dad bought me my first computer back in 1995 which run on Intel Pentium MMX and Windows95 with a 1.7GB Hard Disk (pathetic! my SD card can store more data than this HDD).
Many years down the road and after few PCs change, I finally own my first notebook in 2002. With a notebook, I feel that the data redundancy is getting more important as I put almost all my work data inside 1 single Hard Drive. Then I started to realize the importance of doing a more regular backup on the notebook comparing with my desktop that run on 2 x HDD. Even a regular backup would cause a havoc on critical day if the Hard Drive decide to die.
What is the next step?
I change Hard Drive every 2 years, it's for better reliability, performance and space upgrade. My current notebook came with a Fujitsu 160GB 5400rpm Hard Drive. The performance was adequate when I just got it that time as I do not store a lot of data especially emails in my notebook. Now, I have more than 100,000 emails in my hard disk itself and it's a pain whenever my email client (Thunderbird) trying to load that particular folder and compact it. This also affect other applications that try to load huge data from the disk.
2 years are up and I've decided to change the Hard Drive. After looking around, I have narrowed down my option to Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200rpm. My options were Intel X25M 80GB SSD and Seagate Momentus Hybrid XT. SSD were too expensive per GB and Momentus Hybrid was not in the market yet.
Here is the screenshot of the benchmark test on HDtune on both of the Hard Drives, do the judging.
