Half a Terabyte on 2.5 Inches: Nine Hard Disk Drives Roundup
 

Half a year ago we welcomed early 2.5-inch hard disk drives with a capacity of 500 gigabytes and now every manufacturer offers such products. A delay with the introduction of a new series would allow the opponents to rake in all the profits.

It is in human nature to be always asking for more. 320GB HDDs had seemed just fine in terms of speed and capacity but as soon as there appeared larger-capacity products, their higher recording density also bringing a promise of a performance growth, the previous favorites were abandoned. The recording density per platter grew up from 160 to 250 gigabytes, allowing the manufacturers to reach the beautiful round number of 500 gigabytes. Coupled with the considerable reduction in price (such HDDs cost about $100 in retail now), this has made the new models highly popular. People use them to increase the amount of disk space in their notebooks, to modernize or assemble a super-compact home PC, in mobile enclosures, in blade servers, in NASes with 2.5-inch bays, etc. To cut it short, the new 2.5-inch HDDs have caught the spotlight.

And we are lucky to have as many as nine such HDDs in our hands: one 5400rpm 250GB-platter model from each of the six makers, two early models based on three platters, and one 7200rpm model with two platters. It’s time to write a review!

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...d-roundup.html

16 pages and no noise measurement.

it's not their specialty; go here if noise is primary concern :)

noise matters to almost everyone these days and even a person who knows nothing about technology still feel the difference

but for these drives, going for 2.5" 5400rpm, you're quite safe;)

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17010/13

not exactly, especially because the buyers of such drives have often a increased sensitivity to noise

I expected better from Momentus 5400.6 which is a recent drive... most likely noise is measured out a case, so vibration noise is part of the equation, need to have inside a housing/laptop results.

I swapped 3.5" 80gb 7200rpm SATA with 2.5" 300gb 5400rpm; noise drop is noticeable, especially seek noise has been drastically reduced