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Introduction:::...

If you've taken even a passing interest in notebook prices over the past 12 months or so you can't help but have noticed the plummeting prices. This isn't happening because manufacturers are stripping out features, in fact quite the opposite is true with even budget units offering CD Writer/DVD-ROM combo drives and 30GB plus hard drives. It's in fact a rather pleasant side effect to advances in miniaturization and maturing manufacturing techniques which relegates last year's "bleeding edge" technology this year's "nothing special".

Of course, as prices have fallen and capabilities have climbed, so more and more people, who would in the past have spurned the notebook for its limited usefulness, are suddenly seeing all kinds of possibilities opening up to them. And as more people buy, so prices fall, and we all like falling prices.

Not too long ago I was lucky enough to get hold of one of Toshiba's 100GB MK1031GAS hard drives to test, and was genuinely impressed with its very impressive performance which was no doubt helped by its industry-leading areal density of 80 gigabits per square inch.

Today I have the MK1032GAX for review. While this shares the same 100GB capacity and impressively low power requirements, it adds a further 8MB to the MK1031GAS's already generous 8MB buffer making it a monstrously large 16MB in size, and they've also cranked up the rotational speed from 4200rpm to 5400rpm!

Much of the information for this hard drive was covered in my review of the MK1031GAS, but rather than send you over there to read it I've zapped it over here, that way you can just skip the bits you've already read.

In other respects the two drives are very similar. As usual, the specs: