Seagate ST9500420AS, 500GB Mobile SATA Momentus, 7200RPM 16MB Cache

Fast but noisy/vibrating
I upgraded the 320MB 5400rpm Hitachi HTS543232L9SA02 drive to the 500GB Seagate Momentus ST9500420AS in my Macbook Pro (2.66GHz Core 2 Duo). Technically it works really well, no hiccups with the installation, no heat issues even when working hard, and the system feels more nippy (I use things like Photoshop, VMware Fusion etc.).

"xbench" (a free Max benchmarking utility) now reports a "Disk Test" score of 52.6 (vs. 33.7 for the 5400rpm drive). Sample xbench results show a much better performance increase than expected:

Sequential
Uncached Write 256 MB blocks: 78 MB/s (vs. 40 MB/s for the 5400rpm drive)
Uncached Read 256 MB blocks: 80.6 MB/s (vs. 41.1 MB/s for the 5400rpm drive)

Random
Uncached Write 256 MB blocks: 52 MB/s (vs. 20.7 MB/s for the 5400rpm drive)
Uncached Read 256 MB blocks: 26.2 MB/s (vs. 13.2 MB/s for the 5400rpm drive)

Unfortunately the drive is a bit more noisy than the Hitachi, the normal "disk spin"...

Seagate ST9500420AS, 500GB Mobile SATA Momentus, 7200RPM 16MB Cache

Big notebook drives
It's hard to see past the value of this 500GB 2.5" notebook hard drive. I still find it amazing the way storage space doubles - the drive replaces a non-functional 250GB 5400rpm Western Digital unit that was original OEM equipment. The difference in speed between a 5400rpm and 7200rpm drive is easily noticeable during boot, with Windows 7 Professional starting to a login prompt in less than 25 seconds on my system. However, once things are up and running and in everyday use scenarios, the benefits are more marginal. I'm sure this is partly due to the built-in flash cache module on my Dell XPS M1330 notebook (aka Windows ReadyBoost/ReadyDrive/SuperFetch), and party because the seek to seek times don't really improve with a higher spindle RPM.

Suummary:-

Excellent drive, backed by Seagate's rock-solid reliability and performance. No noticeable increase in noise over a 5400rpm drive, and with Vista/Windows 7 hybrid disk power savings I'd say the battery life is more...

Seagate ST9500420AS, 500GB Mobile SATA Momentus, 7200RPM 16MB Cache

MacBook
Easy to install and just a couple of minutes to format.
Used Time Machine to load on a full clone of the original drive which took a couple of hours.
No problems at all - no vibrations, no more heat than the original.
Probably the best