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While all 3.5” hard drives will fit into every 3.5” drive bay or hot swap frame as long as you use the correct interface, there are more differences in the 2.5” space. The UltraATA interface has finally been replaced by Serial ATA in the mainstream, which is why upgrade users have to pay attention: none of the 500GB hard drives are available with a parallel UltraATA interface. You will have to look for 250GB hard drive if you want to replace an existing notebook disk, as the latest models aren’t available with the older interface.
Spindle Speed Matters
In addition, rotation speeds and cache capacities may vary. While cache capacity does not have a significant impact on hard drive performance, spindle speed is extremely important. Faster rotation speeds lead to better throughput and to quicker access time, as there will be less rotational latency, which translates to waiting time.
Notebook hard drives are available in three different speeds: 4,200, 5,400 and 7,200 RPM. Obviously, the last of these is the quickest choice, but they consume slightly more power and potentially reduce battery runtime on your notebook a bit. However, there are always exceptions to this general rule, as you can see in the power consumption results of our benchmark section.
Enthusiasts want Flash SSDs
Drives running at 4,200 RPM will eventually die out, as there aren’t substantial cost savings or much better capacities compared to models at 5,400 RPM. The 7,200 RPM speed will remain the best for the time being; 10,000 RPM is a viable option for high-performance notebooks, although some sort of hard drive cooling might then be required. For these applications, solid state hard drives based on flash memory are the much better, but also more expensive, choice.
Height Differences
Finally, there are differences between 12.5 mm (Hitachi Travelstar 5K500) and 9.5 mm (Samsung Spinpoint M6) 2.5” hard drives. All of the flash based 2.5” drives fit into the 9.5 mm envelope, as the PCB with the flash memory chips and the controller can often even be fit into an 1.8” form factor. 12.5 mm drives, however, are usually more suitable for external storage or portable storage applications, where space restrictions usually do not apply.
Here is the difference between the 12.5 mm and 9.5 mm heights. Hitachi’s Travelstar 5K500 requires 12.5 mm of clearance.
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The article says there is a 2.5" 320GB PATA drive - what is it? The largest I've seen is the WD2500BEVE.
TYPO:: Your article mistakenly say Hitachi Deskstar when it should say; "Hitachi Travelstar", all throughout all the benchmark results...
Terry, I too have not heard of a laptop drive larger than 250GB that is PATA.
Samsung has now brought down the height back down to 9.5 mm at this capacity point.
-_-
Platters 2 3 3
shouldn't it be 2 for the Samsung?
and
Interface SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s
shouldn't it be 1.5 for the Samsung?
Patrick and Achim,
try setting the drives to sata 1.5gbs instead of 3.0. the single drives do not need that much interface bandwidth, but the 3.0 interface uses more power.
Terry--you are absolutely correct. Reference fixed to reflect your observation.
Dan--We're fixing the charts right now and will have them updated as soon as they are ready.
Magic--Axed the redundant "down"
Hrod--according to the story's author Samsung's original launch documentation said 2 platters and 1.5 Gb/s. It has since been fixed and everything in the piece updated to reflect that the Spinpoint is actually a three-platter device with a 3 Gb/s interface.
Thank you for the feedback guys!
Guys why arent these HDD's on the charts, they have been reviewed by you and are close to the 2nd and 3rd fastest disks...?
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 776-8.html
comparable chart found here
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 776-5.html
It would be nice if the Samsung drive wasn't such a power hog - I would love to have a fast 500GB drive in something like a HP mininote for using as a portable movie player. But getting 1.5TB raid 0 in a Clevo D900 now doesn't sound bad either...
A nice detailed review as usual.
Any chance that you could do a review of 2.5" 7200rpm 320GB HDDs. I believe Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, and Samsung all have them now. I'm waiting for someone to do a comprehensive review before buying one to upgrade my laptop. I would think that Hitachi's might be the fastest given the performance of the 7k200, but I've been hearing good things about the WD 320GB Black so I guess we'll see.
Two errors: the opening paragraph claims that Samsung's 500 GB drive uses two platters, when it actually uses three (however, the detail page for this product gets it right).
Also, 12.5mm was not the "initial" height of laptop drives -- there was a point in time when those were considered the slim ones, as there were 17mm and 19mm height drives before them (I used SCSI models in my PowerBook). Searching for "19mm laptop drive" will verify this.
How long do you think it will take for these issues to get worked out?
- Seeking the best performance 500GB drive for my MacBook Pro ASAP!