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?

[Macphisto]

"Serious gaming"?

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.

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

Flash hybrid drive

[griffindj]

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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?

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: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!