Largest notebook drive?

Hi,

i haven't been up on these things for a while.

Last time I was, the largest notebook drives (that could actually fit in most notebooks) was 750GB. Is that still the case? Or are there 1 terabyte notebook HDDs now, that actually will fit in most notebooks?

 

They have standard 2.5"/9.5mm 1TB hard drives now, but mostly 5400 rpm. If you want a 7200 rpm drive the largest size is still 750GB I believe.

 

I heard that because of the higher data density the 1tb 5400rpm , has a data transfer rate equivalent to an standard 7200rpm hdd.

 

Yeah I don't know what the platter arrangements are inside the 1TB drives, but that cold be a possibility. Perhaps someone else could shed some light on that?

 

the last benchmark I saw said that a 1tb 5400rpm was ~~ to a 500gb 7200rpm

 

If you want the fastest drive that isn't a hybrid, it is going to the 750GB WD Scorpio Black. 1TB drives are a bit more unreliable as well, btw. I have had my 750 drive for a while and have had 0 problems so far.

 

The fastest and largest notebook drive by far is the Seagate XT 750GB Hybrid.

See:
Seagate 750GB Momentus XT 7200.1 SATA 2.5in Hybrid Drive w/ 32MB Cache at Memory Express


Not only does it smoke all notebook HDD's, it even surpasses by a considerable margin my vRaptor's in real world use.

Scorpio Black's are fast - if we're talking strictly mechanical drives - but Seagates XT Hybrid's are in a different league (and the new one will be improved further next year with a firmware upgrade that will enable write caching as well).

How fast are the XT's? Even the previous version's (500GB) model cannot be replaced in my desktop (with firmware SD28) with any other hard drive without giving up performance, increasing vibration, noise and power consumption and without requiring the added drives to be in at least a 2 drive RAID0 array to feel somewhat equivalent to the XT. And this includes my now retired vRaptor's.

The only thing that will be faster than the 750GB XT Hybrid is when Seagate comes out with the 3.5" (desktop) XT Hybrid models (early next year).

Or, a high capacity (over 250GB), top of the line SSD (Intel, Crucial), of course.

Strictly mechanical drives?

Even Scorpio Blacks... Good bye, my friend, I'm leaving you today, good bye, good bye, good bye.

 

In terms of read/write speed, that is true, however you still have the rotational latency to deal with. Under general use a 7200rpm drive will always be faster due to reduced latency on small file transfers.