Good 2.5" laptop hard disk drive

[sharad]

I am looking for a 2.5" laptop SATA drive, which will be used inside a external USB enclosure.

I have narrowed down the list to 3. Leaning towards the Hitachi right now because it seems to be faster and I am thinking about running Virtual Machines directly off the external drive via USB (if possible). More space would be nice but I am willing to sacrifice it, if speed improvements are significant with the 7200 RPM drives.

Seagate Momentus 7200.2 ST9200420AS 200GB 7200 RPM SATA2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822148307

HITACHI Travelstar 7K200 HTS722020K9SA00 (0A50940) 200GB 7200 RPM SATA1
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822145160

Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEVT 320GB 5400 RPM (SATA2?)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822136197


It seems the external enclosure, which I have already bought, is SATA1 only. Hopefully the SATA2 drives will still work in that.

I have never had to deal with a laptop drive before, so asking the question here. Any suggestions about the choice? Should I get the 16MB Hitachi or SATA2 Seagate. Should I forget about 7200RPM and just get the slower but higher density WD drive to get better sequential reads?

 

[sharad]

Ok, I went with more storage in the end and got the Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEVT 320GB 5400 RPM.

http://www.tweaktown.com/revie...ntroduction/index.html
After reading the above review it seemed to me that the Scorpio isn't that far behind Travelstar.

Happy with the purchase so far. It's working silently and cool inside my Transcend StoreJet enclosure.