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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."
tremendous boost in performance by upgrading this one component
If you think THATs suprising, imagine my face when I found out that FLAMMABLE and INFLAMMABLE mean the SAME THING.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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)
While for instance Moore's law still holds the hard drives are not developing as fast. Ca. 10% performance improvement per year in the previous years is a good estimate. That means the hard drives are actually the slowest advancing components. In modern higher end PC they are the slowest link and in many applications the most horrible bottle neck.
..), the fastest things are expensive or on development cycle anyways... The state of hard drives and their performance is simply put pathetic and will be at least for the next a few years.
There isn't a good solution available either. RAIDs can get expensive, flash and similars can be fast but there are problems with interfaces (quality, selections,
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.
most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck by outfitting their units with a low-end, low-cache, low-capacity, low-spindle-speed HDD.
Well, they're saving an average of 111 bucks in these examples. The "low-end" model is about 35% of the cost of the others (on average).
Now look at the performance differences. WorldBench is clocking the more expensive drives as only 30% faster (on average) than the "low-end" drive.
My own conclusion: yes, you're getting a performance boost if you pay more... But it's definately not a 1 to 1 ratio. In fact, for the money, the "low-end" drive is the best solution. So... Why do "most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck (or 111 bucks)? Because it's a better choice for the average consumer! Believe me... If Company A started selling only expensive drives, their market would go niche (like Alienware), and most people would purchase a "lower-end" machine.
When I fire up my laptop, its because I'm not at a outlet, or am moving somewhere. The harddrive is the largest battery pull on my old rig. I'm not looking for fast but smart. They should have large caches and 4200 rpm or maybe even lower. An old toshiba from the 80's I've had, used to run for a few hours with power management. I haven't seen that again from these new 'mobile super computers' that is flooding stores. SATA is one of the smart ideas, but they'll all be chasing the benchmark crown for speed.
I think I just cashed out all my cool points.
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.
Since when was 10-30% overall from worst to best performer regarded as tremendous? The impact of the disk subsystem is around 30% on daily tasks, and around 70-90% on disk-intensive tasks. So we're looking at a ' tremendous performance increase' of around 10% to 25% in the best case, only achievable by owning the worst performer, and thence upgrading to the best available technology.
While it is nice to have fancy shmancy specd laptops to tote around, you can only put faster (read: more power / heat) devices in a laptop to a certain extent. There is a curve that follows along with an opposite one, which refers to efficiency / portability and the other to power / speed.
The other end of this discussion that I've not seen discussed yet is being mobile also presents real dangers to physical disks. Perhaps having a slower spindle speed is slightly less risky for those individuals who insist on slinging around a computer while it's powered on.
Gyroscopic forces probably hit those drives harder too, with thinner platters. Anybody who has held a bicycle tire in their hands while sombody else spun it, then tried to tilt it one way or the other knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
If the computer runs faster you may use less power. If it takes 10 minutes to check email and slashdot with the old drive and 9 minutes with the new, you've just saved 10% time spending 3.5% higher power rate. That's about 7% less power consumed.
Man, you really need that seminar!
It would make a lot of sense to have 10% of your disk solid state, only spin up the real drive as necessary. I don't think multigigabyte memory will be affordable anytime real soon.
Man, you really need that seminar!
The other issue with using ultra fast spindle speed HDs in laptops is that it makes your laptop pull to the left.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck by outfitting their units with a low-end, low-cache, low-capacity, low-spindle-speed HDD
That's because rational consumers 'persist' in saving a buck by buying the least expensive thing they think will fill their needs.
Most people buying PCs have absolutely no idea how to compare one computer to another. Even most Jeff K's understand nothing beyond screen dimensions and clock speed (and I've worked with enough IT people toto understand that Jeff K is the rule, not the exception). Of course, even the bottom of the line $650 Dell XPS comes with a 7200 RPM 8MB Cache HD, so I'm not sure what kind of poor sucker is still getting the 4200 RPM dog described in the article.
Swapping is the bottleneck. So remove the bottleneck. No seriously. The harddisk activity you are most likely to notice is memory swapping. Swapping can be disabled. Of course you run out of memory if you do that, so add more memory. I find that with 2GB no application ever complains of having not enough memory despite there being exactly 0MB of swap space. I run some pretty memory intensive stuff too. It turns out most of this stuff is designed to run well on systems with only 512-1024 MB (particularly games rarely use more, even if it is avaialable). That extra GB is cheaper than a new harddrive and if 2 is not enough make it 3 or 4. It's not like win32 processes can address more than 2GB anyway!
At least under windows, memory swapping is implemented very stupidly. Basically the system will spend (your) time swapping even when there's plenty of memory available. I've observed it swapping applications to disk with over 75% memory available. This causes all sorts of noticable delays when you try to actually use your system (e.g. switching from application A to application B). With 2GB available, windows should run out of excuses to swap but it will still swap.
Disabling swap space effectively stops this behavior. Especially on slow harddisks this means a huge performance improvement. Depending on your software you can do with much less memory. I've disabled swap space on machines with only 512MB which you are unlikely to exceed running just office type applications. In all cases that I did this the result was an immediate, noticable performance increase.
In case you do run out of memory, you get an out of memory error. I find that closing applications usually is a good solution. Much better than windows continuously wasting my time with unnecessary UI blocking harddisk activity. Anyway, given the low cost of memory, I'm very intolerant towards having my time wasted due to the fact that there's not enough.
Jilles
Are they really? I'm on an iBook G4 w/768Mb of memory. I hardly ever shut the machine off; it does sleep mode perfectly, so there's never really a need to reboot. When I'm working, it's on only a few applications at a time; the second or two it requires to load a seldom-used application is so rare that I honestly can't see how a faster hard drive would provide me much benefit at all.
In all honesty, the slowest thing about my computer is me. Even if an app were to load instantaneously, my brain is still gonna spend a few seconds getting its shit together to actually use the application, let alone do anything truly useful with it.
--
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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.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
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.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
In my day, a hard drive was going across the country in a car with kids in the back whining, "Are we there yet?" We didn't have it easy like you whipper-snappers with your SATA and your RAID! Hell, Raid was for killing bugs.
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