Internal Storage

All the laptop's I have now support mSATA and at least 1,2 or 3 hard drive bays (if the DVD Rom is removed).

I have been looking at the 2.5inch laptop drives and something really concerns me. I remember the days when 5400 rpm drives where the best your could get..... then came the 7200 rpm drives and there was no turning back because they were that much faster.

So I am booting from mSATA's for the OS (Primarily Linux). and I want to put a high speed, high capacity hard drive in the hard drive bay. Well...... My hard drive of choice for speed are the WD Black drives. Unfortunately they max out at 1TB.

Then I saw some Seagate drives and other drives that offer 2TB and they are 9mm drives. well low and behold they are only 5400 rpm drives but have some small flash/nand/ or what ever mini SSD on them.

I would love to have half a dozon 4TB Evo 850's from Samsung but at $1399 a pop, I am not buying any soon.

So is there anyway I can get a 2.5 inch 9mm 7200 rpm drive with 2TB of storage?

 

Don't buy a 7200rpm hard drive. You actually WANT a 5400rpm drive. They are far superior to 7290rpm drives when used as a secondary drive to store bulk media (photos, music, videos, porn).

In general, a 5400rpm drive will run cooler than a 7200rpm drive. It will use less battery power, and generate less heat. You get the option of higher maximum capacities. And they are generally cheaper.

The speed advantage of a 7200rpm drive only matters for random seek operations. And random seek doesn't apply to bulk media storage, which are all large sequential read / write operations. You will never notice a performance difference between 5400rpm vs 7200rpm when used for bulk storage. A 4GB MKV BluRay rip will play back equivalently well on both drives.

Spindle speed doesn't matter when it comes to performance on bulk storage drives. So get the drive that is cooler, quieter, more power efficient, cheaper, and higher capacity.

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

 

@kent1146 is right about 5400rpm drives not much slower in sequential. It would be helpful if we can know OP's primary use case for those drives.

BTW, doesn't porn usually come in photo or video formats? It shouldn't be an independent category.

 

Yeah, but it's a bit like how personal digital photos come in the same photo file format (usually JPGs) as the 80KB little quick images or memes you download from the internet.

Technically, they are the same file format. But the sheer file size and file volume of your personal digital photos completely eclipses anything else you own that uses JPG. That's why digital photos would be considered a category by itself. By similar logic... uhhh... let me just put it this way.... I have about 8TB of raw bulk media storage. And most of it ain't to watch Batman movies


Even Bill Watkins, the former CEO of Seagate, famously said back in 2006:

"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."​

 

Agreed. You need very little actual speed to read most media, there's no point in a faster drive for just storage.

 

Will throw in another vote for 5400RPM drives. Hell, they are even better than 7200RPM drives for bulk storage in the desktop space as well as a the laptop space (I have a few 5400RPM drives in my home server, for example).

 

There's form factor to consider too, I don't think there are any large capacity 7mm drives at 7200, and some systems will either only take a 7mm or you have to stack them to get more than one and the bay is <16mm.

 

I have the 2TB 7mm drive in my Dell and it works well.

 

What model is that drive?

 

There's one from Seagate.

 

I have 3 2tb of those Samsung spinpoint 9.5mm HD from the alienware 18x r2 days. Soon I will use one and sell the 2tb SSD in the gaming/business laptop. SSD prices have gone up so much that I can make a small profit on that SSD. I have a 500gb SSD for business files and more important games.
I love those Samsung spinpoint HDs.

 

Same. They're one of the more reliable mechanical drives I've come across.

 

I have this drive in mine, no complaints. I've honestly had more WDs fail on me than Seagates in the past.

 

ME too....I have the firecuda 2 TB drive in my dell and its super fast and works great! I have had many more WD drives fail than seagates in my 20 years or more of using and building computers.