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."

Hard Drives are the slowest advancing components

[Anonymous Coward]

While for instance Moore's law still holds the hard drives are not developing as fast. Ca. 10% performance improvement per year in the previous years is a good estimate. That means the hard drives are actually the slowest advancing components. In modern higher end PC they are the slowest link and in many applications the most horrible bottle neck.

There isn't a good solution available either. RAIDs can get expensive, flash and similars can be fast but there are problems with interfaces (quality, selections, ..), the fastest things are expensive or on development cycle anyways... The state of hard drives and their performance is simply put pathetic and will be at least for the next a few years.

Biggest bottleneck

[hjf]

IMHO, what makes a crappy (laptop) computer different frin a great computer is the hard drive. The biggest bottleneck is the hard drive, no matter if you have a Pentium 4 or a 486, if you put a fast drive, the machine will work great, but if you put a slow drive performance hits the bottom, even if you have a dual, quad or 64-core computer...

Re:suprise :(

[Mayhem178]

For future reference:

Flammable vs. Inflammable [lifetips.com]

Anyways, back on topic. The day I see a mobile HDD survive an 3-story fall onto solid concrete, then I'll be impressed. And yes, I've seen it. Except for the surviving part.

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.

Re:swapping is the bottleneck

[pilkul]

Yeah, I often do something similar: I fix the amount of swap space to a set amount (e.g. 1gb). It seems that Windows wastes a lot of time resizing the swap file and I've seen noticeable reduction in thrashing when you stop it from doing this. A useful alternative when you don't have the large quantities of RAM to prohibit swapping completely.

Re:power is rate * time

[Anonymous Coward]

The thread heading is plain wrong. Do not confuse Power and Energy. Rather, with electricity-related units added for illustration:

• Power [W] = Energy rate = Energy [W s] / Time [s]
• Power [W] = Voltage [V] * Current [A]
• Energy [W s] = Power [W] * Time [s] = Voltage [V] * Charge [A s]

If the computer runs faster you may use less power.

Which one consumes less energy depends on both the power and the total time (which, granted, was the point of the post).