I am pricing HDs for my laptop right now and trying to work out the best deal.
Since it is a couple of years since the laptop was top of the line, I am thinking that perhaps I wouldn’t get full benefit out of a “fast” HD though. When a 20gig at 5400/pm and a 40gig at 4200/pm cost the same, the slower speed starts sounding kind of tempting. The differences in storage I understand, but how much difference do the spin, cache and access times make?
To give some background info, the laptop is not used for anything particularly heavy, I play games on it sometimes, but they are mainly older games, I code and surf and do a little bit of everything, but nothing too demanding. It is a 700mhz PIII with 384 megs ram. Thinkpad X21. I am guessing also that faster spin = greater heat too. At what point am I buying more HD than my system can properly take full advantage of.
Cnet did a recent review of harddrive, though for desktop. THey found no significant difference between IIRC 5400 and 7?00, and said just go w/ the best price. They did mention that the 10000 scsi did make a difference IIRC.
Go for the larger drive instead of the faster one, generally. What are you planning on doing?
In my hopefully-soon-to-arrive laptop, I opted to save $125 by going for the 80Gb/4200 model instead of the 80Gb/5400 model, because all of the reviews and USENET opinions seemed to indicate that it was good enough for my own purposes. And this IS a top of the line laptop.
The big thing, though, will be to evaluate your own purposes. The most agressive thing I was interested in doing with mine was video work, and 4200 is fast enough.
Laptop drives are way more expensive that desktop drives. Why not just get an external hard drive to supplement your existing hard drive? Keep all of your media files and less used games on the external and you could free up a lot of space on your existing drive.
External hard drives are a really, really good choice or a bad one for a laptop depending on what you need it for. For example if you’re wanting the OS to have more space, you’re pretty much out of luck. As far as I know, no Intel-based computer is capable of booting off of an external FireWire or USB drive. Of course my knowledge could be way out of date. I think a Mac computer is capable of booting from FireWire or USB devices, though (actually, they’re also capable of being FireWire devices).
If you’re just interested in data storage, an external drive is good in the right circumstances. Because you have an older computer though, you probably don’t have USB2, and unless it’s a Mac probably don’t have FireWire or SCSI. Which means you’re stuck with an old, slow USB connection. This is not as fast as you’re going to want for data storage.
If you do have FireWire, but your goal is to capture digital video (for example), you probably will be disappointed with an external drive as the destination. Because you don’t have FireWire 2 (too old laptop), your pipe is limited to 400Mb/s, meaning you’re going to move DV from the source to the computer and back out to the hard drive over the same connection. This will result in dropped frames. Unless, of course, you have two independant FireWire busses.
Hmmm… why don’t you tell us what your interface options are, and what you’re expecting the new hard drive to do for you?
Lots of good info so far! As I was saying the laptop is my “general use” computer. I do a little bit of everything, but nothing too extreme, surf the boards, resize a pic, watch a movie, play older games, listen to internet radio etc.
An external HD is totally uninteresting here, the main advantage of the laptop is its portability, I sit in the sofa with it or take it to a café or on the train. This baby is tiny, even the cd and floppy are external! I have proper machines downstairs for playing new games and doing graphic/video conversion etc. I also have a central file server for files, so long term storage isn’t an issue on the laptop either. I want to be able to keep all my progs installed instead of having to switch between them and to be able to have space for a few films etc when I go away for a weekend. 40 gigs is going to be more than enough for me, so the question is just how little I can get away with spending. I will check what the speeds of the one that are in it are and get back later
Capacity - up to 4.3 GB Rotational Speed - 4200 RPM
Interface standard - ATA-4 Average seek time - 13.0 ms
I mainly want to increase my capacity, but of course a little boost in performace wouldn’t hurt. Actually, I think I may have answered my own question… “don’t buy anything lower than those stats” :smack:
