Notebook Hard Drive Roundup

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."

The best notebook harddrive?

[intmainvoid]

is an external firewire drive!

My 7k60 screams

[peterdaly]

I replaced the factory hard drive in my 12" PowerBook with a 7k60 a couple years back or so. The speed difference was so huge from a normal user perspective I wondered if the factory drive had always been defective. After trying other powerbooks, I have seen the factory drives are just really slow and the 7k60 is really fast.

It's hard to express in words how much faster my machine "felt" in everyday use. Startup time alone went from so slow where I always put the thing to sleep -- to my shutting down quite often now because it doesn't seem to take an eternity to boot.

Number and words do not do justice to the speed improvements possible by upgrading a slow 4200RPM drive for a 7K(whatever) drive. If you can afford it, I highly suggest you consider upgrading your slow laptop drive to a 7200rpm drive even if your factory drive is not dead (and out of warranty), which was the case for me.

-Pete

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[Eberlin]

I would imagine it to be too costly to do gaming on a laptop. The heat issue, graphics cards that can't be upgraded, and power consumption in general would be too much. I suppose if you could afford it, why not, right?

For me, though, the laptop isn't a gaming platform. It'll run Unreal Tournament II decently, but Enemy Territory runs at maybe 20fps max (10fps average). Yeah, it's not high-powered...it's also not too upgradeable. Definitely not as tweakable as a good ol' desktop. If by "gaming" you mean an occasional bout of Frozen Bubble, then sure, why not? Anything needing more oomph, probably not.

Maybe there's a market for it out there, like there's a market for high-priced luxury cars. All I know is that I'm not its intended target 'cause I couldn't afford a gaming laptop nor could I justify preferring one over a desktop for gaming.

You'd want to plug it into a bigger monitor anyway. You'd need a power outlet for extended gameplay. You'll need a table to set it on 'cause it'll be really WARM from all that processing/spinning. You'll most likely plug in a USB optical mouse with one of those gaming mousepads. Did I mention you'll have a hard time upgrading the graphics card? In the end, you might as well have a desktop.

Hugely useful, especially for Mac users

[Rackstraw]

About time someone did this! Ditto to the other post about huge speedups when getting rid of old 4400 Powerbook drives.

With more and more people doing video editing and compression (Final Cut, iMovie) and audio stuff (Logic, GarageBand)... it's very valuable to do this stuff on the go. It's not just gaming that sucks up resources.

So kudos to SR for putting this together, and it would be nice for Apple to provide speedier config options for its customers.

Re:Fuck'em

[Sivar]

at least these guys know what they talk about

Right, Storagereview.com, a website dedicated to reviewing hard drives since 1998, doesn't know what they are talking about when reviewing hard drives.

Don't worry, yours doesn't sound like a fanboy post or anything. ;)

and their Recommended sections give you all the damn facts you need in the easiest possible way to read them

Good point, because it is such a pain in the ass clicking on Performance Database [storagereview.com] at the top and then choosing to sort by NOISE or POWER DISSIPATION.

Seriously I don't know how anyone can be expected to figure that out.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[meisenst]

Yes. People do.

I used my laptop (Eurocom D500P, basically a branded Clevo) for gaming for quite a while. It had a mobile ATI 9600 Pro, 1 GB of RAM, 60 GB HD, and was a very reasonable gaming machine. Still is, but it can't handle some of what I play, notably Everquest, and that is mostly due to the game's horrible graphics engine.

Games like q3 arena, BF1942, Steam and all of its bits, and even Battlefield 2, Doom 3, Quake 4 run pretty decently with appropriate settings levels. This would probably go for any laptop that is similarly outfitted, including the Compaq/HP nc8000 that I use at work (which also has a Mobility Radeon in it). I haven't played around with any geForce Go laptops, so no idea how they fare.

Now, keep in mind that this machine, like most that can be used for high end gaming, are laptops of the "portable but plugged in" variety. They'd likely run out of battery life in minutes rather than hours if left unplugged.

What good is a hard drive that is not reliable.

[plebeian]

The one thing this review is lacking is a durability study. As someone who has been repairing laptops for the past 10 years the hard drive is the weakest link(unless you count the battery). As long as people are screaming about I/O per second or data transfer rates we are not likely to see that change. Reviews such as this are shameful in that they leave out the most important metric.