I am a sucker for more of everything when it comes to computers, so I had to upgrade my MacBook Pro's hard drive to 160GB — the biggest hard drive available at retail. (Of course, soon after I ordered it, 200GB drives started becoming available and Hitachi announced 250GB notebook drives… bastards).

Anyway, it's a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (product ID HTS541616J9SA00) … and just a word of warning to other potential buyers: this drive is NOISY. Unlike all the other drives I've had in my previous PowerBooks and MacBook Pro, which have either been Fujitsu or Seagate, this one sounds like a desktop hard drive of old. Do anything remotely data intensive and my lovely quiet notebook starts making frantic 'da-dadada-da-dadada-dadada' noises.

Also the Mac tech who installed it for me (Tim Gudex) told me that the air hole on the drive that is boldly marked "do not cover" (presumably to allow the air in the drive to contract and expand with heat) is placed exactly where the MacBook Pro's hard drive cable has to go. So he had to fudge it a little bit by using some tiny foam blocks to lift the cable up over the hole.

Despite all that, I'm not entirely dissatisfied with the drive. It seems fast enough and I now have more than enough space to install Vista onto the machine and dual-boot it with OS X (and keep ample TV shows etc on the drive).

However, next time I upgrade I think I will stick with Seagate which generally seem to be quiet and reliable notebook drives. In fact, I would have bought Seagate this time except that their 160GB SATA drive was quite a lot more expensive than the Hitachi one :-(