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."

Comments

Toshiba missing

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

Re:IBM laptop

[don_bear_wilkinson]

Don't forget, if you're using Windows, a significant portion of your performance bottleneck comes from Windows' heavy reliance on the disk for Virtual Memory (swapfile). Even when abundant RAM memory is available, most Windows OSes will swap out to disk - causing significant performance degradation. Disk I/O is much slower than RAM.

To help improve matters (assuming, of course, that you have copious amounts of RAM installed) you can 'tune' Windows to reduce its use of the Paging File, thereby speeding things up. This requires modifying the Registry. The usual caveats about Registry editing being potentially dangerous, etc., apply...

For Windows 2000 and XP; "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive"; Set to '1' decimal.

There are other memory tweaks that involve changing Disk I/O buffering and System Cache. You may want to do your own research. :)

Enjoy!