Notebook Hard Drive Roundup 122
Sivar writes "With the increasing popularity of notebooks and their growing use in gaming and workstation-like tasks, it is important to consider the performance of more than just the CPU and video. Storagereview.com has a roundup of notebook hard drives which includes their new gaming and office tests, server performance graphs for those so inclined, and finally power usage and noise numbers which are particularly important for laptop hardware."
Toshiba missing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Laptops really for gaming? (Score:3, Informative)
I tried out Farcry on it. It played FINE (granted, not on the highest detail settings). I sat in the passenger seat of a car and played with a trackball.
Later, I tried City of Villains on it. It played fine.
This thing isn't even a "gaming" laptop. An X600 is modest, not exceptional, graphics hardware, but it's good enough for something as modern as Farcry. I'd say mobile gaming is at least a possibility on new hardware.
The other thing is... most laptops (including my 3-day-old Gateway) still ship with 4200rpm drives. And, amazingly, the bit-density of large drives (80GB or 100GB or 120GB) is still good enough to keep up with the faster-spinning power-hungry 5400 and 7200rpm models; drives with high density platters read data in larger chunks regardless. When I look at the trade-off in battery life for going to a faster drive, I'd have to say I'm a little put off. Mostly I'm going to load Firefox and/or a word processor on that thing, and that's about it. Even with a 7200rpm drive, I'm not going to get a huge subjective improvement in performance.
Re:Laptops really for gaming? (Score:2, Informative)
Power consumption isn't much of a factor...when you're doing anything that requires special attention (ie work or gaming), you'll likely be stationed somewhere and plugged in. Some of the 12lb monsters that Sager puts out pretty much assume you'll be using the thing at a desk. As for monitors, there are models with 17-inch screens available and 19-inchers are coming soon. If you need something bigger, just output to a TV.
I want an upgrade (Score:3, Informative)
Problem is this laptop has a SATA->IDE bridge chip (apparantly made by Intel). So you can use an IDE drive.
Problem this gives is that most drives (with rare exception) generate a BIOS error on startup, that IBM/Lenovo has so far failed to fix.
I'm really hoping they get it fixed. With that drive, this would be the top performing laptop on the market. It really is a nice laptop. It does have a little thermal problem, causing the fan to stay somewhat loud, even when thermals cool, but I suspect that's a BIOS upgrade at some point in the future. Sounds like the settings are a little to harsh. IMHO not a big deal.
I'm really hoping this doesn't become a trend for Laptop HD's. I really want to upgrade. This thing is a real great example of what makes IBM/Lenovo laptops so good. Sturdy, fast, reliable. Just need that HD upgrade now
Re:Notebook hard disk sizes haven't grown (Score:3, Informative)
After Seagate announced their next-generation 100 GB 7200 RPM drives (Momentus 7200.1), I waited over a year, checking every few months for availability. They never came and I gave up. Now I see they've finally been released, but sheesh, on the desktop, 100 GB drives are getting pretty rare because they're just too small to bother with.
Re:IBM laptop (Score:3, Informative)
Make sure you've got 512 meg memory in the system though, not much point in replacing the hard drive if it's still going to swap to disk constantly.
Re:IBM laptop (Score:3, Informative)
To help improve matters (assuming, of course, that you have copious amounts of RAM installed) you can 'tune' Windows to reduce its use of the Paging File, thereby speeding things up. This requires modifying the Registry. The usual caveats about Registry editing being potentially dangerous, etc., apply...
For Windows 2000 and XP; "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive"; Set to '1' decimal.
There are other memory tweaks that involve changing Disk I/O buffering and System Cache. You may want to do your own research. :)
Enjoy!
Re:Laptops really for gaming? (Score:3, Informative)
My other 'desktop' computers are used as servers or for work-only (aka workstations).
There are quite a few valid reasons for using a laptop for gaming. For one, I like to be able to sit on my bed or sofa and play Battlefield 2 without any lag via 802.11g and a logitech wireless mouse. I like to be able to bring my laptop easily to my friends' houses or to LAN partys without having to worry about alot of cables or weight (though my laptop is pretty heavy). I like to be able to do some horrible mundane task in WoW while watching an utterly crappy SciFi movie on TV in comfort. The main difference of a laptop over a desktop is portability at the cost of more $$ for equal performance. Otherwise there is nothing stopping even affordable (read ~$1000) laptops from being decent to great (~$2000) gaming machines.
No, given power constraints, I don't do ANY real gaming on battery only. My laptop would only last 40 minutes or so with that scenario and that's what, one round of BF2?
My current laptop is an Alienware and before that I had a Dell that I used just as much (and was alot cheaper), and with a little lag was also perfectly fine for all my FPS needs (played doom 3 fine and that was like a radeon 9600 mobile w/ 64MB of ram or something? maybe 128).
Server performance of 2.5" drives - look out! (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, and want killer IOPS with microsecond seek times? Try the Adtron SATA flash drive [adtron.com]. 40GB will only set you back $18,000.
Best drive for USB enclosure? (Score:3, Informative)
A USB enclosure for a 2.5" HD is cheap, small, and convenient, but which of these drives would be best for this?
Obviously speed doesn't matter.
Probably the most important factor is power consumption since these enclosures run off the USB power which is barely enough for these drives. The WD drive is strange in that it gets very good numbers for operating power dissapation and noise, but then is 2nd worst for startup power dissapation. I guess that puts it out of the running.
Here's the relevant page:
http://storagereview.com/articles/200511/notebook