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

Laptops really for gaming?

[Barkley44]

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.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[drinkypoo]

I'm personally considering a move to no-desktop computing. Laptops have come down so far that they're finally almost affordable, although as ever you can build a desktop to beat the pants off a laptop for something like half the price. I did a 3dmark test of my desktop (athlon xp 2500+) with a radeon 9700 pro against a mobile athlon 64 3000+ with a mobile radeon 9-something and I got literally twice as many 3dmarks as the laptop, so I wouldn't be able to play any of the hot new games worth a damn, but all of the older ones would be fine.

In addition, with console game systems becoming a more credible place to play first person shooters (see nintendo revolution's controller, eh?) I may not have any reason to play any non-strategy PC games. Those games [generally] need CPU more than graphics, so that should be fine.

Mostly, I don't have time to play PC games any more. Console games are usually broken up into smaller, more convenient pieces. Granted, you can usually save anywhere in a PC game, but it can be disorienting coming back in the middle of a mission. I believe the move towards laptops can also be seen as a move away from sitting on your ass in front of a big heavy display for long periods of time - people making that move probably aren't playing many PC games anyway.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[slaker]

On Saturday, for no particular reason, I bought a $1300 Gateway Athlon64/4000 with 1GB RAM and an X600 graphics chip (roughly on-par with a Radeon 9700).

I tried out Farcry on it. It played FINE (granted, not on the highest detail settings). I sat in the passenger seat of a car and played with a trackball.

Later, I tried City of Villains on it. It played fine.

This thing isn't even a "gaming" laptop. An X600 is modest, not exceptional, graphics hardware, but it's good enough for something as modern as Farcry. I'd say mobile gaming is at least a possibility on new hardware.

The other thing is... most laptops (including my 3-day-old Gateway) still ship with 4200rpm drives. And, amazingly, the bit-density of large drives (80GB or 100GB or 120GB) is still good enough to keep up with the faster-spinning power-hungry 5400 and 7200rpm models; drives with high density platters read data in larger chunks regardless. When I look at the trade-off in battery life for going to a faster drive, I'd have to say I'm a little put off. Mostly I'm going to load Firefox and/or a word processor on that thing, and that's about it. Even with a 7200rpm drive, I'm not going to get a huge subjective improvement in performance.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[Golias]

I've been on campus again recently because of a night class I'm taking. Here's what I've noticed:

For a lot of college kids these days, the laptop is their only computer. If a game doesn't run on a laptop, they don't play it. They are more likely to own a handheld console than a desktop PC.

As far as I can tell, Quake III and City of Heroes were made strictly for the VH-1 demographic (and their children.) Young adults are mostly giving the PC game scene a pass.

The one exception seems to be World of Warcraft, which actually plays pretty well on low-end laptops. (I've played it on an iBook myself, and found that it worked quite well.)

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[cbrhea]

My new laptop has become my primary machine at home for coding, gaming, blogging, etc.

The desktop has been relegated to filesharing and being used by the wife.

Yes, it's becoming more popular.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[Macphisto]

"Serious gaming"?

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[Eberlin]

I would imagine it to be too costly to do gaming on a laptop. The heat issue, graphics cards that can't be upgraded, and power consumption in general would be too much. I suppose if you could afford it, why not, right?

For me, though, the laptop isn't a gaming platform. It'll run Unreal Tournament II decently, but Enemy Territory runs at maybe 20fps max (10fps average). Yeah, it's not high-powered...it's also not too upgradeable. Definitely not as tweakable as a good ol' desktop. If by "gaming" you mean an occasional bout of Frozen Bubble, then sure, why not? Anything needing more oomph, probably not.

Maybe there's a market for it out there, like there's a market for high-priced luxury cars. All I know is that I'm not its intended target 'cause I couldn't afford a gaming laptop nor could I justify preferring one over a desktop for gaming.

You'd want to plug it into a bigger monitor anyway. You'd need a power outlet for extended gameplay. You'll need a table to set it on 'cause it'll be really WARM from all that processing/spinning. You'll most likely plug in a USB optical mouse with one of those gaming mousepads. Did I mention you'll have a hard time upgrading the graphics card? In the end, you might as well have a desktop.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[east coast]

do people really use their laptops for serious gaming?

It depends on what you consider serious. I use my laptop to play stuff like EQ2, Civ 4 and Evil Genius but when it comes to FPSs I'm still a desktop devotee; for one reason it's cheaper and another is that I normally don't use my laptop on a desk, so in the matter of keyboard/mouse play the desktop is more natural to me.

Could I use my laptop to play HL2? Sure, but my performance would suffer simply because of layout over computing power.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[meisenst]

Yes. People do.

I used my laptop (Eurocom D500P, basically a branded Clevo) for gaming for quite a while. It had a mobile ATI 9600 Pro, 1 GB of RAM, 60 GB HD, and was a very reasonable gaming machine. Still is, but it can't handle some of what I play, notably Everquest, and that is mostly due to the game's horrible graphics engine.

Games like q3 arena, BF1942, Steam and all of its bits, and even Battlefield 2, Doom 3, Quake 4 run pretty decently with appropriate settings levels. This would probably go for any laptop that is similarly outfitted, including the Compaq/HP nc8000 that I use at work (which also has a Mobility Radeon in it). I haven't played around with any geForce Go laptops, so no idea how they fare.

Now, keep in mind that this machine, like most that can be used for high end gaming, are laptops of the "portable but plugged in" variety. They'd likely run out of battery life in minutes rather than hours if left unplugged.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[Rude Turnip]

On some of your better laptops (ie Sager, Quanta, which you can get through companies like powernotebooks.com), they offer upgradeable graphics chipsets through a recently standardized slot system.
Power consumption isn't much of a factor...when you're doing anything that requires special attention (ie work or gaming), you'll likely be stationed somewhere and plugged in. Some of the 12lb monsters that Sager puts out pretty much assume you'll be using the thing at a desk. As for monitors, there are models with 17-inch screens available and 19-inchers are coming soon. If you need something bigger, just output to a TV.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[DarkTempes]

I *only* use my laptop for gaming.

My other 'desktop' computers are used as servers or for work-only (aka workstations).

There are quite a few valid reasons for using a laptop for gaming. For one, I like to be able to sit on my bed or sofa and play Battlefield 2 without any lag via 802.11g and a logitech wireless mouse. I like to be able to bring my laptop easily to my friends' houses or to LAN partys without having to worry about alot of cables or weight (though my laptop is pretty heavy). I like to be able to do some horrible mundane task in WoW while watching an utterly crappy SciFi movie on TV in comfort. The main difference of a laptop over a desktop is portability at the cost of more $$ for equal performance. Otherwise there is nothing stopping even affordable (read ~$1000) laptops from being decent to great (~$2000) gaming machines.

No, given power constraints, I don't do ANY real gaming on battery only. My laptop would only last 40 minutes or so with that scenario and that's what, one round of BF2?

My current laptop is an Alienware and before that I had a Dell that I used just as much (and was alot cheaper), and with a little lag was also perfectly fine for all my FPS needs (played doom 3 fine and that was like a radeon 9600 mobile w/ 64MB of ram or something? maybe 128).

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.

It's too bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

The best notebook harddrive?

[intmainvoid]

is an external firewire drive!

My 7k60 screams

[peterdaly]

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

Re:My 7k60 screams

[tomstdenis]

Two words. "Ram cache".

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 .so cache] which is a heck of a lot faster than from a 7200RPM disk.

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

Flash hybrid drive

[griffindj]

ahref=http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/ storage/story/0,10801,101330,00.html/rel=url2html- 18969http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/s torage/story/0,10801,101330,00.html/>

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?

Hugely useful, especially for Mac users

[Rackstraw]

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.

Re:Fuck'em

[Sivar]

at least these guys know what they talk about

Right, Storagereview.com, a website dedicated to reviewing hard drives since 1998, doesn't know what they are talking about when reviewing hard drives.

Don't worry, yours doesn't sound like a fanboy post or anything. ;)

and their Recommended sections give you all the damn facts you need in the easiest possible way to read them

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.

Notebook hard disk sizes haven't grown

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Notebook hard disk sizes haven't grown

[timeOday]

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

In fact we broke the 80 GB barrier a lot longer than a year ago. My T40 is well over 2 years old and came with an 80 GB drive.

After Seagate announced their next-generation 100 GB 7200 RPM drives (Momentus 7200.1), I waited over a year, checking every few months for availability. They never came and I gave up. Now I see they've finally been released, but sheesh, on the desktop, 100 GB drives are getting pretty rare because they're just too small to bother with.

I want an upgrade

[digitalgimpus]

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 ;-).

What good is a hard drive that is not reliable.

[plebeian]

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.

Re:IBM laptop

[compwizrd]

Put a 7k60 or similar in it. I did that, and it's MUCH MUCH faster. Also, it doesn't seem to run any hotter than the stock 4200rpm drive.

Make sure you've got 512 meg memory in the system though, not much point in replacing the hard drive if it's still going to swap to disk constantly.

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!

Server performance of 2.5" drives - look out!

[jlseagull]

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. :)

Best drive for USB enclosure?

[Qwavel]

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_ 7.html