Our trusty old ASUS M5p that runs the digital photo printing and scanning setup at home has a failing 60GB hard drive. Nice that this SMART feature tells you that and the thing has been hanging. Its a nice notebook with the Dothan processor, so seems a shame to scrap it. It has a 2.5" disk and an ATA connection, so off to find a good replacement drive.
Gizmodo mentions that Hitachi was first out the gate with a monster drive, the Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 was announced mid last year and uses the PATA not SATA but is 160GB . Newegg reviews loved it, but, Pricegrabber":http://www.pricegrabber.com/rating_getprodrev.php/masterid=21730756/id_type=masterid
Here are the reviews, it seems like we are at the start of the next generation of 160GB perpendicular drives, but they have reliability problems. It is tempting to get though because it is exactly the same price as the 100GB drive according to Mpire
Storagereview has a two year old review of drives and like the Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 with 100GB capacity, 7200 RPM, 50GB/platter at $110. Mpire shows new at $115 from Newegg. If you are worried about reliability, there is the E7K100 which Silentpcreview likes and which is supposed to have enhanced reliability whatever that means, but it is the same price as the 7K100, but doesn't implement power saving modes for laptops, so you don't want that but apparently some of these features like unloading the heads automatically reduce the life of the system, so get the E7K100 for desktop/server and the 7K100 for notebooks
As an amazing aside, Hitachi announced a Terabyte in a hard drive. Called the 7K1000, it has 5 platters. Wow, how cool...
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