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

suprise :(

[TheRealMindChild]

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.

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.

It's Simple...

[MudButt]

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.

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.

Re:where are the flash hard drives?

[LunaticTippy]

The cheap flash memory (like in my 1GB thumbdrive) has ~100,000 r/w cycles. If your internet cache was there, you'd hose that memory within hours.

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.

swapping is the bottleneck

[jilles]

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.