The drive features a Fluid Dynamic Bearing motor for quieter operation and spins at 5400 RPM. It's rated for ATA-100 speeds and has a 12ms average seek time. While this may seem slow by desktop standards, keep in mind that more compact lower density notebook drives have a lot of catching up to do. From a laptop perspective, things are looking good for Toshiba's high-end HDD. Two 40GB platters are used to account for the 80GB rating, which is good news since larger platters offer better performance. Last but not least, this drive like so many newer models doubles the previous record by utilizing a 16MB cache. It's no secret that a larger cache is directly proportional to higher transfer speeds (WD's aforementioned SE series proved this). To top things off, a 3 year warranty on 2.5" drives is a step in the right direction (unfortunately 1.8" and optical drives still only carry a 1 year warranty).