ClusterFunk

I mentioned that my laptop HD went pop last Monday in my praise of the Ubuntu live CD. I have decided to get a external drive to backup onto (it took six days and much faf to get my data back) and also run my VMs from. So I had a word with my colleague Simon TechHead who is our resident hardware guru for spec’ing this sort of hardware (He’s also a bit tasty with all things HP) * PLUG* He has some excellent advice for building low cost VM lab environments   

So Simon gave me some tips – eSATA II, big cache 16Mb is good and fast so 7200RPM. He pointed me at the Western Digital WD3200BEKT 2.5" 320GB 16Mb cache 7200RPM  we found it for around £65inc VAT + P&P.

So I tried the usual suspect for quality hardware at very competitive prices

Overclockers
Lambda-tek
MicroDirect
ebuyer
TechStore

They are all in the upper £65+ mark 

I managed to find it here for the princely sum of £57.82 inc Vat
http://www.drivemylaptop.co.uk/LaptopPartsList.aspx?pt=3