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Seven Mobile ATA Hard Drives Compared

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the compare-and-win dept.

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."

3 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Quite true indeed by jawtheshark · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  2. Power consumption by Junta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  3. Re:It's Simple... by nfarrell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.