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."

Laptops really for gaming?

[Barkley44]

I see this hyped all the time, but do people really use their laptops for serious gaming? I mean a large portion of people? I have both a desktop and laptop, but would never use my laptop over my desktop. I see commercials with companies showing someone riding a bus playing a game on their laptop, and I just can't see that happening. Office applications I see the biggest use.

It's too bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that most of the time you can't elect to put a faster hard drive in your laptop from the factory. I've bought laptops, and then had to retrofit them because they didn't sell a bigger or faster version.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[drinkypoo]

I'm personally considering a move to no-desktop computing. Laptops have come down so far that they're finally almost affordable, although as ever you can build a desktop to beat the pants off a laptop for something like half the price. I did a 3dmark test of my desktop (athlon xp 2500+) with a radeon 9700 pro against a mobile athlon 64 3000+ with a mobile radeon 9-something and I got literally twice as many 3dmarks as the laptop, so I wouldn't be able to play any of the hot new games worth a damn, but all of the older ones would be fine.

In addition, with console game systems becoming a more credible place to play first person shooters (see nintendo revolution's controller, eh?) I may not have any reason to play any non-strategy PC games. Those games [generally] need CPU more than graphics, so that should be fine.

Mostly, I don't have time to play PC games any more. Console games are usually broken up into smaller, more convenient pieces. Granted, you can usually save anywhere in a PC game, but it can be disorienting coming back in the middle of a mission. I believe the move towards laptops can also be seen as a move away from sitting on your ass in front of a big heavy display for long periods of time - people making that move probably aren't playing many PC games anyway.

Flash hybrid drive

[griffindj]

ahref=http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/ storage/story/0,10801,101330,00.html/rel=url2html- 18969 [slashdot.org]http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/s torage/story/0,10801,101330,00.html/>

Samsung is planning on releasing a hybrid flash/disk drive in the second half of 2006, which is around the same time as Vista. The hybrid drive is said to use 10% less power by reducing spin up times and also reducing hd failure caused by dropping. When the flash memory is full the data is then written to disk.
What will they think of next?

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[Golias]

I've been on campus again recently because of a night class I'm taking. Here's what I've noticed:

For a lot of college kids these days, the laptop is their only computer. If a game doesn't run on a laptop, they don't play it. They are more likely to own a handheld console than a desktop PC.

As far as I can tell, Quake III and City of Heroes were made strictly for the VH-1 demographic (and their children.) Young adults are mostly giving the PC game scene a pass.

The one exception seems to be World of Warcraft, which actually plays pretty well on low-end laptops. (I've played it on an iBook myself, and found that it worked quite well.)

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[cbrhea]

My new laptop has become my primary machine at home for coding, gaming, blogging, etc.

The desktop has been relegated to filesharing and being used by the wife.

Yes, it's becoming more popular.

Re:Laptops really for gaming?

[east coast]

do people really use their laptops for serious gaming?

It depends on what you consider serious. I use my laptop to play stuff like EQ2, Civ 4 and Evil Genius but when it comes to FPSs I'm still a desktop devotee; for one reason it's cheaper and another is that I normally don't use my laptop on a desk, so in the matter of keyboard/mouse play the desktop is more natural to me.

Could I use my laptop to play HL2? Sure, but my performance would suffer simply because of layout over computing power.

Notebook hard disk sizes haven't grown

[Anonymous Coward]

Notebook hard disk sizes haven't grown much in the last few years. In the late 1990s, notebook hard disks were getting bigger by leaps and bounds. In 1996, an average notebook hard disk was under one gig. By 1998, a low-cost notebook hard drive at Fry's was in the 3 gig range. In 1999, that became a six gig hard disk. By 2003, low-cost notebook hard disks were 40 or 60 gigs in size. Then they stopped growing.

The hard disks being compared here have an 80gb or 100gb size; the biggest notebook hard disks I have seen are 120gb hard disks. We broke the 80gig barrier about a year ago; if disks were growing the way they were in the 1990s, we would have 160gb notebook hard disks by now. I get the feeling that it is going to take a few years to break the 200gb barrier.

I get the sense that the technology is maturing and that people aren't interested in getting really big hard disks any more. So we're not seeing the growth factors we used to have.

Re:My 7k60 screams

[tomstdenis]

Two words. "Ram cache".

I have a Seagate 4200RPM drive in my laptop and while initial startup may be a bit slower than my desktop (by a matter of seconds) application performance is just fine.

Oh did I mention I have 768MB of ram in it and I'm not running Windows?

That's why when I look at buying a new laptop [to replace this thing when it eventually dies] I always look at the max ram. My next one will likely have 768 or 1GB initially [I originally upgraded this laptop from 256M to 768M].

Ram is cheaper on the power than a "really fast hard drive" and in practice is faster too. I start many shells for instance, each time it loads "xterm" [and the shared libraries] they're in cache [or the .so cache] which is a heck of a lot faster than from a 7200RPM disk.

Not saying a 7200RPM wouldn't be nice but if I had to make a choice between spending money on memory or a fast HD I'd rather the memory.

Tom