Seagate is now selling 250GB laptop-friendly hard drives, including a model with integrated automatic data encryption, the company announced this week.

The 250GB drive is part of Seagate's Momentus line. It spins at 5400rpm and connects to the host computer using a 3Gb/s SATA interface. They contain 8MB of cache.

Seagate's Momentus 5400.4: up to 250GB capacity

The 2.5in Momentus 5400.4 line-up also includes 120GB, 160GB and 200GB models. Like the 250GB version, these capacities are what the drive delivers before it's formatted.

Seagate touted the drives' shock resistance - they're able to take 325Gs and 900Gs of, respectively, operating and non-operating shock - and low power consumption: 2W during read and seek operations, 1.6W when writing, 0.6W when idling, and 0.2W in stand-by mode.

All fine and dandy, but Seagate's still behind the curve as rivals like Toshiba, Western Digital and Fujitsu are already touting 320GB notebook drives.

Hitachi, meanwhile, is promising to ship a 500GB 2.5in HDD in the very near future.

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WD puts twin-platter 640GB HDD into mass-production (19 March 2008)
Seagate's big disks pump up outlook (5 March 2008)
Seagate drives up Q3 profit forecast (4 March 2008)
Fujitsu preps 500GB laptop HDD (25 February 2008)
Samsung spins 128GB SSD (7 January 2008)
Hitachi hypes 'world's most capacious' laptop hard drive (3 January 2008)
Toshiba roadmaps 128GB SSDs for March '08 (10 December 2007)
Fujitsu promises 320GB laptop HDD next year (28 November 2007)
Samsung samples SATA II 2.5in SSD (5 November 2007)
WD 'first to ship' 320GB laptop hard drive (31 October 2007)