Well, I doubt I could give a drive a 65G shock over two milliseconds and still have the data be useful to me. According to Wikipedia, humans top out around 20 to 35G instantaneously before losing consciousness. Plus, my laptop probably wouldn't survive a drop of that sort, and it's the only SATA-enabled machine I have, so getting data off the drive after totaling it would be pretty difficult.
Seagate's claiming 300G protection in operation, with 900G's while powered down... As for how true that is, I can't say, but 300 G's sounds more like a nonoperational statistic to begin with. The 7200.2 series has a freefall sensor, so I get the idea that the 300G figure takes into account that the sensor has managed to stop the disk at the time of the fall. Western Digital appears to have the sensors optionally available in their 7200rpm drives as well.
In terms of my applications, the 100gb/5400rpm has proved to be enough for now; I haven't run into problems with either factor yet. I get the idea that the difference offered by a 7200rpm drive would be more immediately noticeable, while buying a larger drive would future-proof the machine somewhat but not be particularly useful until a few years from now, and by that time I may have a new machine altogether.
I back up my drive quite frequently, though I back it up to
another laptop hard drive, so I can't really say it's that effective a backup. Most of my data that's "irreplaceable" is comprised of multimedia; I have DVD backups of photos and downloaded videos, with most of my home videos still being on a drawer full of VHS and MiniDV tapes, and my music collection fully on CDs. The rest I can re-download off the Internet or reinstall from the install CDs.
I could Hibernate the machine between classes. I used to put it in Standby, but now with the charge sensor constantly reporting 0% (completely unrelated problem), the machine won't enter Standby anymore without waking up immediately after I cut the power from the wall. At this point it's more a matter of laziness that I don't outright remap my Standby key to Hibernate instead. I already have my power scheme set to turn off the disk after ten minutes of inactivity, though there's a very high chance that the disk would've spun up just as class ends, since I typically close Word and check my e-mail at that point.
Here are a couple of prices I gathered:
- Western Digital 120GB/7200rpm - $105
- Fujitsu 120GB/7200rpm/8mb - $100
- Seagate 120GB/7200rpm/8mb - $100
- Seagate 100GB/7200rpm/8mb - $95
- Western Digital 250GB/5400rpm/ - $90
- Hitachi 100GB/7200rpm - $80
UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2 x64; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061223 Minefield/3.0 (mmoy CE K8Q-X04)
Laptop: HP Compaq nx6325 - Turion 64 X2 @ 2GHz, 2GB DDR2, 100GB HD, ATI Radeon X300, 15" LCD, Seven Pro
Handheld: Palm Treo 650 - Intel PXA270 @ 312MHz, 10MB RAM, 32MB flash, 2.7" LCD, Palm OS 5.4
