Big help needed choosing right HARD DRIVE for new gaming laptop (M17X R3)

Hi all, as in the title I'm looking for some much needed advice on choosing the right hard drive for a new laptop I'm getting. Considering that my current laptop is well over 5 years old, my knowledge of hard drives is severely limited, and the terms SATA, SSD and RAID are completely foreign to me!

Heres the options from which I can choose:

1. 750GB (7,200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive

2. 500GB Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive

3. 640GB (2x320GB) SATA Raid 0 "Stripe" (7,200rpm) Dual HDD

Now let me just say I'm not too fussed about the size of any of these three, so that can be taken out the equation. Basically, for gaming purposes above all, which would you guys recommend, and why? I've read that the third option, the RAID configuration, offers minimal benefit for gaming, and is prone to mishaps, the other two options I know little about!

On the topic of hard drives, how, for whatever option you believe would be best, would you go about setting up the hard drive in terms of file placement, for optimal performance? I've read about partioning, and locating the OS on one along with games, and putting everything elsewhere, but don't totally understand it, any advice would be fantastic!

Thanks guys, and I really appreciate your time!

 

I would just stick with the stock 750 GB drive and buy another drive afterwards. I wouldn't recommend RAID 0 unless you have a religious data backup procedures. RAID 0 has 0% gaming performance increase, only decrease load times.

 

What is your budget for the drive? And how much do you value decreased load times? If you dont care, get #1, but if you want faster loads, skip 2 and 3 and get a decent SSD, assuming you have the money for one.

RAID (for speed, not backup), in my opinion, has no place anymore, since a SSD can easily beat a 10kRPM RAID setup, especially a SATAIII SSD like an Intel 510 or Vertex 3. As Tsunade pointed out, all a hard drive can do for a game is to decrease load times, and that's it. All other factors in gaming performance mainly rests on the GPU, CPU, and RAM.

Partitioning won't affect gaming performance much at all, if it even has any effect. I use to have a similar setup on my old laptop (Windows on one, a NTFS data partition on another, and Ubuntu on a third partition) so that I could access my data in either OS.

 

Ok that seems to be the common consensus from what I've read! When you say buy another drive, what sort would you recommend? I've read that many people buy SSD raptor drives, and place the OS on these, leaving everything else to go on the original drive (which for me would be the 750GB one). Where would games fit into all this, because surely they would benefit from being on the SSD but clearly space would be an issue here?

cheers

 

If you are going to setup a dual drive situation (SSD and HDD in optical caddy), install your games on the SSD, and do game saves, profiles, maps, etc etc on the HDD. However, there are plenty of games that won't benefit much from a SSD compared to a fast HDD, so you may need to look up games that are optimized for SSDs and install those on the SSD, whereas you can probably leave ~50% of your games installed on the HDD. I don't game much, so I don't know which games would benefit.

 

@jarhead, thanks for your reply, your post seems to have summed up what has effectively taken me hours of trawling through google search results to find! There is the option of a "256GB Dell Mobility Solid State Drive", but as I'm guessing you full well know, it is scarily expensive! Also, it seems very small, and while the performance would be second to none from what you say, I see myself filling this up quicker than I would like. If I was to go for it, how would you recommend me to proceed once I do eventually fill it? I'm guessing one option would be to just not fill it and put unecessary files on an external hard disc etc, or would buying a simple no frills large hard disc (such as the 750gb option one above) be possible? How easy is it to find these to fit in the M17X?

cheers fellas, I truly appreciate your advice here!

 

Ok that seems to make a lot of sense. I'm guessing the OS itself would also go on the SSD?

So I think I have narrowed it down to two options: either go for the outrageously expensive SSD but stand to benefit from the performance, though be wary of the limited space, but perhaps purchase a basic HDD later, or option two-go with the 750gb HDD and be done with it, and vice verca, maybe look into purchasing an SSD to transfer games and OS onto at a later date (though after a quick google search it appears finding aftermarket SSDs to put into the M17X are few and far between)

 

You don't have to buy an extremely expensive SSD to enjoy the benefits. sure, you could buy a SATAIII 256GB SSD and burn a hole in your wallet, but if you're coming from a HDD and have never used any SSD before (as in my case), you'd more than likely be happy with a SATAII SSD, like the Intel 320 series in my W520. Sure, benchmarks aren't top notch, but it feels (and is, compared to a 7200RPM or 10kRPM HDD) much, much faster. I do have some numbers in my W520 review, if you would like to look.

The price per GB in SSDs is around $1-1.5/GB, which compared to a HDD's pennies per GB, is expensive, but you pay for speed. My 160GB SSD was around $290 when I bought it, though you could get the 120GB version for $220, or get an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB for around the same price but with SATAIII speeds (though I would be careful with this, and other, Sandforce-based drives, due to reliability problems).

What I did to solve my storage problems (like you, I want more space lol) is that I replaced the 500GB stock HDD with the Intel 320, and later bought an external HDD dock, like the Thermaltake BlacX series. That way, you can use your laptop HDD like a portable external HDD (I have the 500GB 7200RPM from the Thinkpad, and a 320GB 5400RPM from my dead Toshiba Satellite). The only problem of this setup is that the cheap, mass HDD storage isn't exactly travel friendly, so you might want to buy a SDHC card to add to your onboard storage (something I'm currently thinking about).