Okay time to buy a new HDD?

My one-year-old Pentium M 2.0Ghz laptop is really labouring under its 4200rpm Seagate hard drive, and I was looking to upgrade it to a 7200rpm drive. I have been considering the Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (faster read speeds than the Seagate equivalent), but was wondering - what with perpendicular storage appearing around now, is it a bad time to buy a notebook hard drive? I couldn't find any information on 7200rpm perpendicular drives, but it would be kinda annoying to buy a drive and then find that the new generation appears shortly afterwards. (Sure, things will get outdated, but buying the old generation just before the new one arrives is the worst of both worlds.)

I was also looking at getting some larger external storage, probably a WD drive, though I'm not sure if putting a 3.5" drive into an enclosure would be cost-effective (and would it be more vulnerable to shock than in the manufacturer's enclosure, or have worse power management?).

 

It's not a bad time to buy notebook hard drives. I installed a 100GB 7200RPM drive in my laptop a few months ago, it is fantastic. 100% recommended. I don't consider Seagate's 7200RPM drives to be as good as Hitachi's.

 

Make sure your laptop (which is according to you not the newest) can handle the spike in heat emissions. You may want to consider going for a more conservative, yet still very efficient 5400 RPM. It'll also help conserve battery life when you're on the go.