the seagate's have better command queing and so perform better in real world scenarios. you don't often read/write consequtivel and sequentiall from disk.

It looks like a little bit inconsistency to the previous testing article.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/25inch-hdd 7200.html
Funny.

and you

The speed tests were very good and informative. I would have liked to see some power usage, heat, and noise tests also to get a good overall picture of the drives.

Though you may not be a hardware guy, I think any evaluation of a laptop drive ought to say something about power dissipation. How much current does it use at idle, and how much during read/write ops.