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."

It's Simple...

[MudButt]

most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck by outfitting their units with a low-end, low-cache, low-capacity, low-spindle-speed HDD.

Well, they're saving an average of 111 bucks in these examples. The "low-end" model is about 35% of the cost of the others (on average).

Now look at the performance differences. WorldBench is clocking the more expensive drives as only 30% faster (on average) than the "low-end" drive.

My own conclusion: yes, you're getting a performance boost if you pay more... But it's definately not a 1 to 1 ratio. In fact, for the money, the "low-end" drive is the best solution. So... Why do "most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck (or 111 bucks)? Because it's a better choice for the average consumer! Believe me... If Company A started selling only expensive drives, their market would go niche (like Alienware), and most people would purchase a "lower-end" machine.

Faster Harddrive?

[stonefoz]

When I fire up my laptop, its because I'm not at a outlet, or am moving somewhere. The harddrive is the largest battery pull on my old rig. I'm not looking for fast but smart. They should have large caches and 4200 rpm or maybe even lower. An old toshiba from the 80's I've had, used to run for a few hours with power management. I haven't seen that again from these new 'mobile super computers' that is flooding stores. SATA is one of the smart ideas, but they'll all be chasing the benchmark crown for speed.

Warning: hyperbole detected

[thesp]

Since when was 10-30% overall from worst to best performer regarded as tremendous? The impact of the disk subsystem is around 30% on daily tasks, and around 70-90% on disk-intensive tasks. So we're looking at a ' tremendous performance increase' of around 10% to 25% in the best case, only achievable by owning the worst performer, and thence upgrading to the best available technology.

Face it

[DoctorDyna]

Face it, mobile technology trails regular stuff. It's just a symptom of technology.

While it is nice to have fancy shmancy specd laptops to tote around, you can only put faster (read: more power / heat) devices in a laptop to a certain extent. There is a curve that follows along with an opposite one, which refers to efficiency / portability and the other to power / speed.

The other end of this discussion that I've not seen discussed yet is being mobile also presents real dangers to physical disks. Perhaps having a slower spindle speed is slightly less risky for those individuals who insist on slinging around a computer while it's powered on.

Gyroscopic forces probably hit those drives harder too, with thinner platters. Anybody who has held a bicycle tire in their hands while sombody else spun it, then tried to tilt it one way or the other knows exactly what I'm talking about.

power is rate * time

[LunaticTippy]

If the computer runs faster you may use less power. If it takes 10 minutes to check email and slashdot with the old drive and 9 minutes with the new, you've just saved 10% time spending 3.5% higher power rate. That's about 7% less power consumed.

Re:Power consumption

[Ohreally_factor]

Yeah, that's the trade off. Do you want higher performance or lower power consumption? I would hazard a guess, and say that the majority of laptop buyers want lower power consumption. Those that want performance can upgrade at the time of purchase or sometime in the future.

Most of the time, my 5400 rpm drive is fine on my laptop. When I want performance (say for video editing), I'm most likely to be somewhere where I can plug in to the wall, and use a higher performance, higher capacity firewire drive for my media.

What is important to me is larger capacity. The 100 GB HD on my PB just isn't going to cut it in the near future. So, I'm really looking forward to seeing more HDs that use that perpendicular magic.

Re:where are the flash hard drives?

[LunaticTippy]

The cheap flash memory (like in my 1GB thumbdrive) has ~100,000 r/w cycles. If your internet cache was there, you'd hose that memory within hours.

It would make a lot of sense to have 10% of your disk solid state, only spin up the real drive as necessary. I don't think multigigabyte memory will be affordable anytime real soon.

Can we lose the troll writeups?

[Karma Farmer]

most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck by outfitting their units with a low-end, low-cache, low-capacity, low-spindle-speed HDD

That's because rational consumers 'persist' in saving a buck by buying the least expensive thing they think will fill their needs.

Most people buying PCs have absolutely no idea how to compare one computer to another. Even most Jeff K's understand nothing beyond screen dimensions and clock speed (and I've worked with enough IT people toto understand that Jeff K is the rule, not the exception). Of course, even the bottom of the line $650 Dell XPS comes with a 7200 RPM 8MB Cache HD, so I'm not sure what kind of poor sucker is still getting the 4200 RPM dog described in the article.

The results are clear... ?

[FFFish]

Are they really? I'm on an iBook G4 w/768Mb of memory. I hardly ever shut the machine off; it does sleep mode perfectly, so there's never really a need to reboot. When I'm working, it's on only a few applications at a time; the second or two it requires to load a seldom-used application is so rare that I honestly can't see how a faster hard drive would provide me much benefit at all.

In all honesty, the slowest thing about my computer is me. Even if an app were to load instantaneously, my brain is still gonna spend a few seconds getting its shit together to actually use the application, let alone do anything truly useful with it.

Re:swapping is the bottleneck

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing, I almost always end up doing this even on Linux laptops, and it seems to make the laptop a lot more stable. In this day and age of plentiful cheap RAM, OSes should default to swapping disabled and only prompt the user to enable it when the user first runs something that commits > 95% of memory. Swapping is an anachronism from the days of $100/M RAM, and most data-intensive apps do their own application-aware swapping anyway (photoshop, databases, etc.).

Don't even get me started on the supidity of OSes which prevent a single app from fully utilizing the hardware you paid for. Or ones that load-balance single processes between processors in SMP configs just to make sure cache performance sucks (another Windows innovation).