I've currently got a laptop with an 80 GB 5400 RPM PATA hard drive. Long story short, I'm REALLY out of space. So I'm getting a new one. The only question is which: Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 - 100 GB @ 7200 RPM Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 - 160 GB @ 5400 RPM Western Digital Scorpio WD1600BEVS - 160GB @ 5400 RPM All of them are 9.5mm 2.5" drives, with 8 MB cache, and are all within a dollar of each other in price, ~$109 after shipping. My current hard drive is a Travelstar, and I've been reasonably happy with it. It's quite quiet. I don't know Western Digital's record on laptop hard drives, but their desktop drives are solid, and, Hitachi's (at least their Deathst... er... Deskstars) are not. Best 2.5" drive I've ever had was a Seagate, but they seem to top out at 120 for PATA at 5400 (for 5-egg rated - there's a 160, but at only 3 eggs overall), and don't make a 7200 drive at all. On a side note, what the heck happened to hard drive prices?! From last summer to a few weeks ago, you couldn't find a notebook drive for less than a dollar and change per gigabyte at 5400 RPM, and now it's far less, only 2-3 times as expensive as desktop hard drives. And $1.10/GB at 7200 RPM. When the heck did this happen?
Yeah, got recommended that on another forum. But they told me to go with WD, which I love on the desktop, but have no idea about in this form factor.
All depends on what you do. If you do any sort of gaming or video editing, a 5400RPM HD should be out of the question. I'd definately go for 7200RPM if that's the case. Hitachi, except for the deskstar drive recall, has made pretty good drives. Or.. why don't you just buy an external drive?
Yeah, I just use an external drive with my laptop. If you insist on getting an internal drive though, definitely go for 7200RPM, otherwise it's not worth the cost, IMO. At least you'll get speedier performance from the laptop out of it.
I'm planning to turn my current 80 gig into another external drive (my current one is for OS X 10.5 development, until it's officially released), but looking at how much space the bits I plan to offload take up, I'm worried that only 20 more GB is simply not going to be enough on the internal.
Goddammit, I *know* I posted in this thread. Since we all know that the four games available for Mac ( ) aren't exactly intensive, and that I don't think O2C does much video editing, I don't think a 7200 drive is really necessary. And honestly, I'm really kind of on the fence as to how necessary a 7200 drive is for those in the first place. Seen beautiful results on 5400. Anyway, go Western Digital. I don't settle for anything less in desktop drives, and I've never had a problem with the WD 2.5" drives I've worked with. Not only that, I think they have a pretty hefty five-year warranty.
I noticed a huge difference between 5400 and 7200. 5400s are just plain slow. I also noticed a big change going from an 8mb cache to a 16mb cache, as well.
I went with the 160 GB Hitachi. The 160 WD wasn't available on Newegg, and the deal that would have made it cost the same elsewhere turned out only to be for the SATA version. Also, I suppose it's possible that the hard drive has been the bottleneck for UT2k4, Halo, Call of Duty, Jedi Knight II, Marble Blast, Wingnuts, Civ III and Civ IV, and Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, but I doubt it (then again, I suppose it could be for Doom III and Quake 4, since I don't have room to install them). Rather, I suspect it's my aging processor [action=Order2Chaos]ponders getting a 1.92 GHz G4 upgrade[/action]
Disk speed doesn't usually matter for games as developers go far out of their way to ensure that you won't have to go to disk (except during load screens). Your RAM has to be low for disk to really matter. And even the fastest hard drive won't help much - if you don't have enough memory for a game to run smoothly, there's not much you can do. And load times are determined mainly by sequential read speed which isn't necessarily always faster with higher rpm drives (more density + slower speed can yield faster sequential read speeds). Higher rpm is all about low access time... personally I think this makes a pretty solid difference in the "feel" of your general everyday use. But with laptops, you are limited to 1 internal drive, and you have power considerations so 5400 is probably the way to go, despite the slowness.
As someone who got used to his Raptor drive, I consider a 5400 a death sentence. Things got ugly when I had to use one for a month.
When I upgraded my Powerbook G4 from 80 GB to 120GB, I went from 7200 to 5400 rpm, and I think this is the reason the sound skips occasionally when I watch video from the hard drive (movies, TV shows and the like). I'm not sure though. As for brand, I'm not sure, but I'll bookmark the thread for when I need to figure out improvements again. My Samsung (the new one) isn't bad but for the speed thing, but it's also the one that the directory happened to crap out on.
