Dell has the first 320GB 7,200rpm laptop drive

Desktop types are always kicking their laptop counterparts around, stealing their lunch money, and making fun of their slow and undersized hard drives.

Most laptops have slower 5,400rpm or even 4,200rpm hard drives, usually between 120GB and 250GB in size. For high-end types, there are 320GB laptop hard drives, and also 7,200rpm laptop hard drives, but you couldn't get both of those specs in the same laptop drive [dramatic pause...] until now.

Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Seagate have all recently announced 320GB 7,200rpm laptop hard drives, but Dell is the first to stick them in a consumer laptop, using the Seagate drive in the massive 17-inch XPS M1730.

"Laptop users want every bit of capacity, performance, and durability that desktop PCs deliver," says Michael Wingert, Seagate's executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business, in a press release.

We checked out the Dell Web site and the 320GB drives are available right now, for $50 more than a standard 5,400rpm 320GB drive. Look for these to show up in Alienware laptops next, followed by desktop replacement systems from other manufacturers.

[will2348]

I checked the dell website and found a 400gb hard drive with 7,200rpm however with all the other stuff i wanted it was highly priced.

[speedvillain]

Hard drive?? I'm still waiting for a SSD drive prices to fall. Why would anyone would waste there time and money on a rotary drive these days especially on a laptop..

[charger224]

Perhaps people don't want to add a $600-1000 to their laptop for only up to 128 GB of storage? SSD's have their place, but spinning platters aren't going anywhere soon simply based on raw economics.

[C433Z]

'cause it'll take a while for SSD prices to fall that far, even at the rate that they're going. in case you haven't noticed, a 64gb drive is still about $1000. Plus, by the time those get cheap enough to be viable, i bet that you'll be able to get terabyte hdds for the same price.