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.

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

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.