Drought of new laptop hard drives, ie Seagate 7200.2 and WD's new 250GB Sata 5400 Perpendicular drive.

I first read about Seagate's 7200.2 about 9 months ago. I recall reading availability dates sometimes in Q1 2007. That came and went and it's barely available anywhere. Is seagate not making many of these or is there simply no demand for them right now and thus online retailers such as Newegg dont stock them?

Western Digital announced their 250GB SATA 5400 RPM Scorpio last month touting perpendicular recording. As far as I know it has 2 platters for a very high desity of 125GB per platter. Seagate's best is only 80GB per platter but spins faster and probably uses more power.

I would love to pick up a 250GB WD from a place like Best Buy (I have a $150 gift card burning a hole in my wallet) but I was just at my local store and the largest drive they even carry in store is a WD 120GB.

Any know what's going on? This is definately not like a Wii which is practically sold the second it's off the factory floor so i'm thinking this is a supply and demand issue or something.

 

The 7200.2 drives are a bit hard to find depending on capacity. I have found a few models that are stocked at odd places, but noone like Newegg for example stocks them yet.

Not sure when BestBuy or those guys plan on carrying 7200.2 drives, let alone SATA 2.5" drives in general. My local place only stocks PATA notebook drives.

 

What about this Samsung 250GB 5400rpm @ Newegg.

There is some info about its performance in this thread.

John

 

Nice. Last time I looked, NewEgg didn't have anything over 160GB. Good to see they are finally starting to show up..........

 

www.overclockers.co.uk have them in stock, specifically the 160gb version (with and without G-Force protection).

Also noticed that ebuyer have some, but only up to 100gb.

 

The Seagate's 7200.2 are currently in stock at ncix.com (Canada) and ncixus.com (USA), I'm tempted to place an order but I think I'll wait for prices to come down a bit

 

NCIXUSA.com and NCIX.com seem to have the 120 and 160 in stock:

http://www.ncixus.com/search/?q=7200.2&minprice=Min. Price&maxprice=Max. Price

 

OOPS! I really should read to the end of the thread!!

T

 

Wow, where are they located? Cheapest shipping on a 2.5" drive to WI is 32 dollars

 

Western Digital 250GB are now on Newegg as well

And there's a review by Tom's Hardware about it (and other drives as well)

(hope this hasn't been posted elsewhere already.. if so, my apologies!)

 

I am getting the Seagate 120MB 7200.2rpm hard drive in my new laptop. I will make sure I run HDTune on it when I get my laptop.
Tim

 

I might be reading this wrong or something, but tigerdirect says it has a 100GB hitachi travelstar 7200 that uses perpendicular recording. Good or un-good?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=2682&Nav=|c:1277|c:2676|&Sort=3&Recs=10

 

I think that may be a website error. I don't remember the 7K100 series using perpendicular recording. Unless I'm mistaken, that is a first generation 7200 drive.