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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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...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.
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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?
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.
Two words. "Ram cache".
.so cache] which is a heck of a lot faster than from a 7200RPM disk.
I have a Seagate 4200RPM drive in my laptop and while initial startup may be a bit slower than my desktop (by a matter of seconds) application performance is just fine.
Oh did I mention I have 768MB of ram in it and I'm not running Windows?
That's why when I look at buying a new laptop [to replace this thing when it eventually dies] I always look at the max ram. My next one will likely have 768 or 1GB initially [I originally upgraded this laptop from 256M to 768M].
Ram is cheaper on the power than a "really fast hard drive" and in practice is faster too. I start many shells for instance, each time it loads "xterm" [and the shared libraries] they're in cache [or the
Not saying a 7200RPM wouldn't be nice but if I had to make a choice between spending money on memory or a fast HD I'd rather the memory.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.