Tom's Hardware Hard Drive Comparison Question

Tom's Hardware comparison has been very helpful in helping me decide which hard drive I should get for my laptop. According to the users on this website, the two best companies are seagate and hitachi.

So I have read all the tests on the website but am unsure on which would be the test which most accurately describes what I want desire in a hard drive.

I am getting this laptop to increase the overall speed of the laptop. This includes boot time, load times and the time it takes to boot up programs. I want the hard drive which will be most helpful in speeding up the computer when I am using multiple programs.

1. Which test should I look to compare the two hard drives?

2. A normal 5400rpm hdd usually consumes .7-.8 W of power when idle, however the 7200 rpm hdd i am looking at consumes about double that amount at 1.7 W. How much will the difference in battery power be as a result of this?

 

WOW!!! No complaints about performance.

 

1. Running multiple applications will (depending on how much RAM you have) mean that parts of the RAM gets dumped onto the swap file on the HDD. I would tend to look at the read and write data transfer rates as good indicators.

2. I would estimate that your notebook will draw around 20W (maybe a bit more) when running on battery. So, if the HDD draws an extra 1W then the 20W becomes 21W. If your battery capacity is 50Whr (Watts x hours), 50 / 20 = 2.5 hours and 50/21 = 2.38 hours so you will lose about 7 minutes. If the basic configuration is more power hungry (eg 25 watts, then your run time will reduce by about 5 minutes).

If you are buying your own HDD then make sure you gets the latest version. For example, the Seagate 7200.2 seems to use a little less power than the 7200.1.

John

 

i actually haven't got my laptop yet... lol so I don't know how fast its going to be, but I want to try to get my laptop to be as fast as possible. I'm just getting information so if I do need to get a new hard drive I can get the best value/performance possible.

thanks for the help John,

But what about random access times? What does this mean?

 

The random access time is the average time taken to get the disk heads in the right place to start reading data. This involves (a) moving the head to the right track and (b) waiting for the data to come round so it can be read. The higher the rpm then the less time that (b) will take. A 7200rpm HDD spins at 120 revs/ sec, so 1 rev takes 8.33 ms (5400rpm means 1 rev = 11.1ms). Time delay (a) depends on the design. Hitachi probably has the shortest times but at the expense of increased noise.

The random access time is more significant if the method of operation involves reading lots of small amounts of information from different places. If you are likely to be reading big amounts of data less frequently then the transfer rate is more important.

Perhaps this is is also the place to note that ReadyBoost and TurboMemory work best with the small amounts of data so, if you have these enabled and Vista has made the right guesses about what you will need next, then these will not need to be obtained from the HDD. Vista's PreFetch, which uses spare RAM as a cache, is another speedup mechanism.

Personally, I'm always needing more space so I get the biggest 5400rpm HDD I can find.

John

 

if you want to optimize performance, i might suggest beginning with parts other than the hard drive. the first thing i would do is get 2 GB of ram.