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Notebook Hard Drive Roundup
Sivar writes "With the increasing popularity of notebooks and their growing use in gaming and workstation-like tasks, it is important to consider the performance of more than just the CPU and video. Storagereview.com has a roundup of notebook hard drives which includes their new gaming and office tests, server performance graphs for those so inclined, and finally power usage and noise numbers which are particularly important for laptop hardware."
I see this hyped all the time, but do people really use their laptops for serious gaming? I mean a large portion of people? I have both a desktop and laptop, but would never use my laptop over my desktop. I see commercials with companies showing someone riding a bus playing a game on their laptop, and I just can't see that happening. Office applications I see the biggest use.
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They didn't review any Toshiba drives in this roundup, which they readily admit in their conclusion. This is maybe a sampling or a survey but not a comprehensive roundup.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
You mean my 7200 RPM disk isn't necessarily the best around for gaming :(
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...that most of the time you can't elect to put a faster hard drive in your laptop from the factory. I've bought laptops, and then had to retrofit them because they didn't sell a bigger or faster version.
is an external firewire drive!
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I replaced the factory hard drive in my 12" PowerBook with a 7k60 a couple years back or so. The speed difference was so huge from a normal user perspective I wondered if the factory drive had always been defective. After trying other powerbooks, I have seen the factory drives are just really slow and the 7k60 is really fast.
It's hard to express in words how much faster my machine "felt" in everyday use. Startup time alone went from so slow where I always put the thing to sleep -- to my shutting down quite often now because it doesn't seem to take an eternity to boot.
Number and words do not do justice to the speed improvements possible by upgrading a slow 4200RPM drive for a 7K(whatever) drive. If you can afford it, I highly suggest you consider upgrading your slow laptop drive to a 7200rpm drive even if your factory drive is not dead (and out of warranty), which was the case for me.
-Pete
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Samsung is planning on releasing a hybrid flash/disk drive in the second half of 2006, which is around the same time as Vista. The hybrid drive is said to use 10% less power by reducing spin up times and also reducing hd failure caused by dropping. When the flash memory is full the data is then written to disk.
What will they think of next?
About time someone did this! Ditto to the other post about huge speedups when getting rid of old 4400 Powerbook drives.
With more and more people doing video editing and compression (Final Cut, iMovie) and audio stuff (Logic, GarageBand)... it's very valuable to do this stuff on the go. It's not just gaming that sucks up resources.
So kudos to SR for putting this together, and it would be nice for Apple to provide speedier config options for its customers.
... you can't just pop the old drive into your desktop box. Sure, the adapter's cheap, but it's not like buying a new 3.5" drive and just stuffing it in.
Just junk food for thought...
Don't worry, yours doesn't sound like a fanboy post or anything.
Good point, because it is such a pain in the ass clicking on Performance Database at the top and then choosing to sort by NOISE or POWER DISSIPATION.
Seriously I don't know how anyone can be expected to figure that out.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Notebook hard disk sizes haven't grown much in the last few years. In the late 1990s, notebook hard disks were getting bigger by leaps and bounds. In 1996, an average notebook hard disk was under one gig. By 1998, a low-cost notebook hard drive at Fry's was in the 3 gig range. In 1999, that became a six gig hard disk. By 2003, low-cost notebook hard disks were 40 or 60 gigs in size. Then they stopped growing.
The hard disks being compared here have an 80gb or 100gb size; the biggest notebook hard disks I have seen are 120gb hard disks. We broke the 80gig barrier about a year ago; if disks were growing the way they were in the 1990s, we would have 160gb notebook hard disks by now. I get the feeling that it is going to take a few years to break the 200gb barrier.
I get the sense that the technology is maturing and that people aren't interested in getting really big hard disks any more. So we're not seeing the growth factors we used to have.
Thank you for the very well structured critisism.
What do you have against Storage Review? They do a decent job, and have been around for years. Also, there are no reviews on any 7200 rpm notebook drives at SPCR. Is it possible for you to be helpful without talking like a know-it-all jackass?
I've been wanting to upgrade my IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T43 with either a Hitachi 7K100 or Seagate Momentus 7200.1.
;-).
Problem is this laptop has a SATA->IDE bridge chip (apparantly made by Intel). So you can use an IDE drive.
Problem this gives is that most drives (with rare exception) generate a BIOS error on startup, that IBM/Lenovo has so far failed to fix.
I'm really hoping they get it fixed. With that drive, this would be the top performing laptop on the market. It really is a nice laptop. It does have a little thermal problem, causing the fan to stay somewhat loud, even when thermals cool, but I suspect that's a BIOS upgrade at some point in the future. Sounds like the settings are a little to harsh. IMHO not a big deal.
I'm really hoping this doesn't become a trend for Laptop HD's. I really want to upgrade. This thing is a real great example of what makes IBM/Lenovo laptops so good. Sturdy, fast, reliable. Just need that HD upgrade now
Yes, they do. This 2002-vintage Gateway 600 has been since '04 and runs better on Linux than it ever did on XP.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
One of these would be fun to have. (And the notebook's nice too...) They appear to be out in Europe already and should hit America soon.
Throw in an AMD Turion MT40 (2.2GHz, 25W) CPU (see ewiz.com), 2GB RAM (Crucial PC3200, ~$240), that Hitachi 100GB 7200RPM HD (see zipzoomfly.com), along with the stock 17" widescreen and 256MB Radeon X700 GPU and you'll have a seriously nice gaming notebook.
If you want something really outrageous, the Clevo D900K notebooks take Athlon 64 X2 dualcore CPUs and GeForce 7800 Go GPUs. Heavy though.
There are some nice 15.4" Turion notebooks with X700 GPUs too from Acer and MSI.
Hopefully we'll see some really neat stuff next year when nVidia's new notebook chipset comes out.
My notebook has a lowly GeForce 440 Go though because apparently nobody at HP is into gaming. Nice machine otherwise though.
Get a portable 2.5" USB2/Firewire enclosure, there are even some with both interfaces. That's what I did when I had a 40GB drive sitting around gathering dust. I have a USB2 enclosure, which was 30 buckaroos, and apparently it draws so little power that it dosen't even need the wall wart that it came with. Bonus. The only problem is that it's sorta noisy, but it's relatively fast. It's great for moving big files around, and it's quicker and more cost effective than burning to DVD for most things.
:) Then again, I sometimes I wish my relatives had never met a computer. :(
Along with a knoppix CD, it's also most handy when some relatives' computer dies for some mysterious reason.
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The one thing this review is lacking is a durability study. As someone who has been repairing laptops for the past 10 years the hard drive is the weakest link(unless you count the battery). As long as people are screaming about I/O per second or data transfer rates we are not likely to see that change. Reviews such as this are shameful in that they leave out the most important metric.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
I have an IBM t23, and let the record show that the hard drive SUCKS. It is constantly the bottleneck of the system
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I'm not really surprised that this wasn't in the article, as it's a bit specialized, but can anyone recommend a 30-40G notebook hard drive that can be used to replace the one in my Zen Xtra? It's not dead yet, but it has started grinding a bit.
Well, he has a point.
Storagereview completely ignored noise until recently, and their test criteria are more then questionable.
They dont meassure access noise at all, and their idle nosie meassurements are usually in "xx mm" distance, with xx being a low number... Which doesnt mean shit, as this will only meassure noise emitted right there (whatever surface they put the sensor above), but not the "real" noise profile you get in normal (50cm or so) working distance.
Performance-wise, otoh, their testbed is very balanced and sensible.
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SR has never focused on noise and heat production factors until very recently. Their criterias are sub-par, as well as the documentation of their testing benches (check SPCR, they explain everything about their testing methodologies and update them as soon as they find a flaw).
SPRC has been focusing nearly exclusively on silence and heat issues (notice that it's what I was talking about?) for years, and go up to the pain of providing comparative audio records of the products they review in order for the reader to truely have the best informations they can provide (because, and that's something very few other than SPCR accept to tell you, dB is only a subset of the noise/silence experience, and the type/quality of the sound is almost as important)
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I've been following the laptop hard disks for a little while looking for an upgrade.
For those interested another review is at Tom's hardware.
At any rate, as well as missing the Toshiba drives, I noticed they were using the Samsung Spinpoint M40 80GB for review. I'd discounted that previously because of it's lacklustre performance (also highlighted in the Tom's Hardware review).
But (you knew there would be one!) there's the newer M60 series that was released recently. The HM100JC looks interesting. Better transfer rate as well as lower power consumption, which is always handy for the laptop users.
Anyways, if anyone has one of these baby's pls post your impressions.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
I bought a Fujitsu two weeks back and I installed it today. A previous poster talked about the great difference he saw in performance by going from the factory standard 4200 rpm to a 7200 rpm. While in the review they give pretty bad marks to the Fijitsu drive, in real life, the performance improvement is good enough, considering the money difference between the top drive and this one.
I think it`s a question of balance. It`s hard to justify spending that much more when new hybrid drive will make these technologies obsolete pretty soon. I can only hope that my next upgrade will happen when my drive fails due to overuse. That is the only good way for a drive to fail.
Picked up one of these in early July, swapped out the 100GB 5400rpm for a 80GB 7200 RPM, Boot time went from 17 seconds to 14, 3dmarks from 12k range to 15k range. Battery life from 1hr 46mins at 100% CPU/HDD/MEM utilization to 1hr 37mins at 100% CPU/HDD/MEM. Later swapped out the 1GB of DDR333 (2x512) at 3-4-4-12 for 2GB of DDR400 (2x1024) at 2-3-3-8, updated the BIOS to recognize DDR400, boot from 14 seconds to 12, 3dMarks from 15k range to 19k range. Battery Life from 1hr 36mins (lost a minute from battery fade, damn!) to 1hr 45mins. Most of the gained battery life was probably thanks to BIOS Update changing CPU/GPU temperature threshholds / fan speed. You be the judge, playing Quake4 at 1280x1024/16*aa/4*asf topping 45 minimum fps, average 71fps. All for around $2,500, and only weighs 6.4lbs (including charger)
The review identifies the important qualities as: Capacity, Speed, Power Consumption, Heat Generation, Noise, and Ruggedness.
Then it measures only Office DriveMark 2006, High-End DriveMark 2006, FarCry, The Sims 2, World of Warcraft, IOMeter File Server Tests, Average Read Access Time, Average Write Access Time, WB99 Disk/Read Transfer Rate, WB99 Disk/Read Transfer Rate, Idle Noise, Idle Power Dissipation, Active Power Dissipation, 12V Maximum Power Dissipation, and 5V Maximum Power Dissipation.
Where's the Mean Baggage Checks to Failure?
Where is Height Droppable Without Crashing?
Where is Hours Baked at 75C without Melting Something?
Where is Minimum Functional Temperature?
Where is Number of Times Hit on Head with Frying Pan?
Where is Number of Watermelons Smashed with Working Drive?
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I am looking at these drives for my Mac Mini and a firewire enclosure. I always thought that a raid system made out of 2.5" drives would be cool too, some nice small box that sat there looking cool holding a terabyte in very little space..... Now they can be small, quiet, energy efficient and fast.
who the hell wants a 5400rpm hdd anyhow, even my (92yo) grampa knows better!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
I've never been able to take SR that seriously since they lost their drive reliability results back in 2002 due to a HD failure
Like most review websites, it is run on a dedicated server on one of many hosting services. These companies generally have a generic (and cheap) configuration for easy maintenance, and do not allow "suggestions" for the storage infrastructure.
In fact, SR tried to get them to run the server on two Seagate Cheetah's, but the hosting provider did not want to alter the standard hardware for the server, and rightfully so--they wouldn't have replacement parts in case the Cheetahs died.
I am sure it seems cute and fun to say "ha ha, a storage website lost data!", but you really should learn at least a little about what really happened before making a sweeping decision like "therefore they can't be taken seriously."
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I stuck one in my ThinkPad T22 in place of the 4200 RPM TravelStar that came with it, and the difference is quite noticeable! I'm sure that the much larger cache is what makes the bulk of the difference. It's also much quieter.
That old drive was a major bottleneck, even though I have 256 MB RAM on this system. I ended up putting the old drive into a cheap USB enclosure.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
From TFA: Those in the market for an upgraded notebook hard drive seek more capacity and/or speed. At a rather steep price ($230 at the time of this writing), Hitachi's Travelstar 7K100 offers gobs of both. Though it overall remains a far cry from that of the typical desktop unit, the 7K100 nonetheless delivers the best performance around when it comes both to office/productivity applications and games.
Hopefully it will be a step up from the 4200rpm 40GB drive in my current 12" Powerbook!
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Don't use these for servers. The 10KRPM SAS 2.5" drives are the only ones in the 2.5" form factor that don't crawl into a hole and die under enterprise loads. All of these drives are meant to function on a 30% or less duty cycle in a laptop. Sure, a nice inexpensive 2.5" SATA/ATA drive may be the best in terms of energy/IOP, energy/GB transferred, and $/IOP, but performance declines at .7% a week when running enterprise loads of short random seeks. This was the rule across all mfrs. and drives I tested, from 4200 RPM to 7200 RPM. Drives begin to die after three weeks - even with adequate cooling. All three drive designers and both system designers I talked to said that they're simply not meant to be run in a server.
:)
Oh, and want killer IOPS with microsecond seek times? Try the Adtron SATA flash drive. 40GB will only set you back $18,000.
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For the past few years, the only drives I will buy are IBM/Hitachi. I haven't had major problems with bad hard drives since I have been using them, and have always noticed them to perform a little better. I used to like Fujitsu, but then they had a bad batch of 40GB drives, and since then, I won't touch them. I've been wondering about a runner-up in case I am in a bind, and need to buy one at a local store, and I guess Seagate will be my choice.
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I have a Titanium G4, and one reason that I'm still using a slow drive is because the faster drives create more heat, and my Tit is already too warm :-)
How warm is your lap top?
A USB enclosure for a 2.5" HD is cheap, small, and convenient, but which of these drives would be best for this?
Obviously speed doesn't matter.
Probably the most important factor is power consumption since these enclosures run off the USB power which is barely enough for these drives. The WD drive is strange in that it gets very good numbers for operating power dissapation and noise, but then is 2nd worst for startup power dissapation. I guess that puts it out of the running.
Here's the relevant page:
http://storagereview.com/articles/200511/notebook
May be, but she's *HAWT*.
The hard drive is the slowest part of a modern laptop, by far. Spending money on a faster hard drive will significantly increase performance.
The review, however, did not do any ruggedness testing!! At the very least they should have dropped each drive, one at a time, onto a carpet, then wooden, then concrete floor. What good is a notebook drive if a minor bumps sees the heads or platters destroyed?
I think the review is/was largely a waste of space.
... which one will still function a year from now.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
My laptop (an HP zd7000) is a 2.8Mhz P4 with a 17" widescreen, and an FX5600 mobile chipset. I've used it for LAN games without a problem. Just watch that you don't leave it on your crotch too long unless you want to disable your ability to produce children.
For games such as Half Life 2 and BattleField (1942, I don't own BF2 yet) it ran just fine. Today's laptops really aren't like the laptops of old... there are definately some that more qualify as mobile desktops.