Seven Mobile ATA Hard Drives Compared

AnInkle writes "Though hard drives are allegedly the fastest advancing high-tech product, most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck by outfitting their units with a low-end, low-cache, low-capacity, low-spindle-speed HDD. The Tech Report takes a different angle from other mobile hard drive reviews by including one of those maligned 4,200 RPM, 2MB cache models in their roundup of 2.5" hard drives, which includes 'a 160 GB perpendicular monster and a couple of 7,200-RPM speed demons.' The results are clear that most of us would see a tremendous boost in performance by upgrading this one component."

Comments

Quite true indeed

[jawtheshark]

I use a real old laptop every day. (Just because I'm too cheap to buy a new one) I got it for 100€ from my former employer. It's a P-III 600MHz with 256Meg RAM. I added 256Meg that I had lying around and that already boosted performance.

However, one day the included 6Gig harddisk with a really low speed (Must have been a 4200RPM, but could be less) and I bought a new 5400RPM 80Gig harddisk . That was pretty much the upgrade that gave me most speed. That, and I could finally install more than one OS and keep the machine usable ;-)

Fast harddisks do matter.... Even if I tought that it was one of the least important things in the overall speed of the machine.

Power consumption

[Junta]

I see in their published specs that the 7200 RPM drives run at least 0.4 to 0.6 Watts higher. This may not seem like much, but right now my laptop is sucking about 17 watts of power, and that means about 2.4 to 3.5 percent higher power consumption.

Still not much, but a factor to consider.

Other Benefits

[iPodUser]

I have personally witnessed many mobile PCs speed up and get quieter after having the HDD swapped for a higher spec unit. In addition to the increased performance in read/write speed, many of the newer drives offer another benefit to mobile users: Lower power consumption. Upgrading an older drive to a new faster drive could increase battery life.

I want reliabity

[hey]

I want a raid in a harddrive form factor. So I can just plug it in like a new hardrive but if one disk fails it can still live.

Re:It's Simple...

[nfarrell]

True, the other drives are ~$100 more expensive. If all you got was a 30% speed increase, I'd agree with you.

But these drives are not just faster, they're also higher capacity. An ipod holds more than these low-end drives, and anyone who wants their laptop to be their MP3 player will happily spend $100 extra for ~80Gb more space.

Yep, some people will buy the cheapest thing without looking at what they're missing out on. But it wouldn't be hard to market a lappy as "NEXT GENERATION: MASSIVE 100GB DISK DRIVE". But what would I know, I'm not in marketing.

Pokey Hard Disks

[aarmenaa]

Quite frankly, I feel that 30% understates how slow some laptops feel because of their slow hard drives. I don't really consider myself to be terribly impatient, but a fast hard drive is the best reason I can think of to use a desktop whenever possible. However much as these drives bother me, they do have thier merits. The 4200 RPM drives consume noticeably less power, and are much cheaper, though capacity still has more sway on the bottom line.

There's a nice middle ground for laptops, I think. When my 4200 RPM drive in my laptop died 6 months back, I replaced with a 40 GB 5400 RPM drive with a 16 MB cache. It does reduce my battery power slightly, but the faster spindle and enormous cache make it worth the loss for me. At the time, it was one of the cheapest drives listed on Newegg at $70 shipped. Considering that even the cheapest 20 GB 4200 RPM/2 MB cache drives are $60 shipped, I'd call what I got a good deal.

Re:What?

[Glonoinha]

Throughput. Actually I occasionally chart the growth in CPU speed vs the size of hard drives and there is an amazing difference (with drive space growing a LOT faster than CPU speed) - but on a purely bandwidth based observation, narrowing it down to laptop hard drives only : drives haven't really kept up.

Six years ago most laptop drives were 3600 rpm. Now most laptop drives are 4200 rpm (yes there are plenty of 5400 and 7200 rpm drives out there, but I'd wager to say that most people don't have them.) That's a 17% (1.1667x) boost over six years. Compare that to the PII-300MHz in use six years ago vs the P4-3GHz we can get today and there is a 1,000% increase (10x). Even if you drop in a Toshiba 7200rpm drive, you are still only looking at a 2x improvement in speed over six (or more) years.

Re:Can we lose the troll writeups?

[Browzer]

That's because rational consumers 'persist' in saving a buck by buying the least expensive thing they think will fill their needs.

The rational does not persist, rather it is a new way of thinking. It probably has something to do with the guilt of having to throw away a top-of-the-line-x-years-ago-that-cost-an-arm-and-a -leg-back-then equipment which is worth nothing today (actually in some cases it costs money to get rid of the equipment). In my case, I can't throw away, but I don't use for obvious reasons, a functioning SGI workstation my company bought for $25K, 10 years ago.