largest fastest hardrive

What drive would give me the best performance and storage capacity for a W3J? I am looking to upgrade my 100GB 5400 drive

Links would be great

 

the largest/fastest would probably be the seagate 160gb 5400rpm drive. Saw that on newegg.

Theres also a 200gb (4500rpm.. i think, definitely not 5400 rpm) drive, though i dont know where its sold

 

Best capacity / performance: 100GB 7200RPM that is the only one Ive seen. Unless you are willing just to upgrade HDD space, and leave the RPM alone.

 

I guess I need to figure out whats moreimportant. 7200 rpm upgrade or an extra 60GB. What have others chosen or what would you choose?

 

don't forget the seagate 5400rpm drives with perpendicular recording - i believe they provide performance similar to a 7200rpm parallel recording drive, but with higher capacity

 

Like most people say, a computer is a fast as its slowest component, ie usually the HDD. If you got the W3J+ and were in your shoes, I get a faster HDD. The 5400 maybe as fast as 7200, but its not equal too it.

 

Your saying the 160GB perpendicular drive performs as fast as the 100GB 7200rmp drives??? How is that so?

 

The bits are denser, so more bits are read per angular velocity. This isn't exclusive to perpendicular recording, it's like this for every advancement in platter density. It's just that perpendicular recording is a higher jump in density than normal.

Of course, I don't think it's going to make it as fast as a 7200RPM drive, Seagate has been saying this of their 2.5" 5400RPM drives for years.

I'd get a 100GB 7.2k RPM drive, either a Seagate or a Hitachi would be my choice. If you really need more space, get an external drive. You can get a 2.5" USB or Firewire enclosure for a pretty good price (but beware the cheap and sometimes expensive ones use slow Firewire and USB chips). Or if this is your desktop and you just want the storage at home you could always get a 3.5" drive and enclosure (or lug it around, for that matter).

 

No I have around 1TB of raided storage at home I guess I will go with the 7200rpm drive. Where will I see performance gains though?

Thank you for the info by the way.

And do you have a link to the best 7200 rpm drive I can get

 

"In addition to avoiding the Superparamagnetic effect, perpendicular recording technology makes much more efficient use of a disc's surface area. Perpendicular recording is expected to allow for areal densities an order of magnitude higher than what's possible with longitudinal recording, although early implementations are a long way from that theoretical peak. Still, even a modest increase in areal density should provide tangible performance benefits. Higher areal densities allow a drive head to access more data over the same physical distance, enabling higher sustained transfer rates that can improve file copy times, application performance, and the like."
Full article here.

There's also an article comparing various mobile HD at that site ( link).

 

Just one question then, is there a perpendicular version for the 7200 for notebooks?

 

Hopefully we'll see that next generation. I suspect heat and space for actuators is coming into play here, but I'm by no means an engineer.

 

160GB Seagate 5400.3
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/906/
http://www.laptoplogic.com/reviews/detail.php?id=104&part=full
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/seagate-momentus-54003.html

 

From reading those articles it looks like there IS a an increase inperformance in addition to the space gain. Looks like its the best balanced upgrade

 

yes, performance is down to the specs. perpendicular doesnt have any performance gains. even seagate said that them self

 

??? Did you read the reviews? The tests in the review show there IS a performance gain.

 

For pure speed Hitachi make tha fastest 7200 rpm notebook drive, but for now they do not go over 100gb.

I chose to go for the Seagate 5400.3 prependicular drive, it was quicker than the Fujitsu but not as fast as the 7200 rpm drives, but performance vs size vs power consumption it is the best.

I was going to go for a 7200 rpm drive but even at idle it was consuming much more power (I cant remember the exact figure, you are aonly talking about a extra watt but compared to the power consumption of a 5400 drive it was a lot more) check out some reviews actually state idle read and write power consumptions, make your own decision.

My W3J can calculate Super Pi to 2M in 1:16esc with the Seagate 5400.3, I am very happy with performance.

So to answer your question 7200 Hitachi would be that fastest, but as it is currently limited to 100gb, the Seagate 5400.3 Prependicular drive gives the best performance for a 5400 drive with the bonus of having 160gb of storage.

 

Just for the record, the Seagate 7200.1 beats out Hitachi's 7k100 in most of the Tech Report tests. Given, it's only one benchmark battery, but Tech Report is typically very accurate.

 

Yeah I dont have a link but when i was researching about drives about 3 weeks ago I did see a review between Seagate and Hitachi 7K drives, Hitachi was better performance.

I can't remember which exact drives were tested, the last three weeks have been busy, all I am saying is just have a good look around before you buy.