Need help choosing fastest possible HD for my X31

[aw]

Hi,

I'm in the market for a new hard drive on my X31. I currently have a Hitachi HTS541616J9AT00 160gb 5400 drive, and want something faster. I can't afford SSD at this point.

Wondering if anyone knows... what is the fastest drive I can put in this thing? I'm pretty sure there is no way to use one of the new SATA laptop drives since my X31 has the ATA interface. There isn't any type of adaptor that I am overlooking, is there?

I am currently looking at:

Seagate Momentus 7200.1 ST910021A UltraATA/100

and

Hitachi HTS721010G9AT00 100GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache ATA-6

Are there any other contenders that I should be looking at? Oh one last thing, I can't vouch for how accurate these charts are, but I have been looking at this page for numbers:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25 ... &chart=141

Thanks in advance for any advice you might have.

[Harryc]

Either the Seagate or Hitachi 100GB 7200rpm drives you mentioned would be the fastest for that machine. My personal preference is Hitachi. SATA would not work.

[Jason404]

I am planning on making this upgrade as well. My X32 currently has a 40GB 4200rpm drive.

Those are the only two models to consider, as far as I know, and as the chart shows that the Hitachi is a bit faster.

'losmeme' has made this upgrade, and says to make sure you get a Hitachi 7K100, and not a E7K100 (higher-performance drives that run hotter, for rack-mount blade servers).

That chart you linked to shows that the 7200 drives use quite a lot more power. This will mean more heat and less battery life I hope they are not noisy as well.