What are the best notebook hard drives around today?

I haven't looked at this site or similar ones for quite some time, so don't know what the latest hardware is?

Regarding standard size 2.5" notebook drives that fit in most notebooks.

(Not a discussion of SSDs in this thread, but HDDs. (including hybrid))

What are the best, fastest, largest (also most reliable, etc.) notebook drives out today? (can include hybrids that have some flash memory)

Thank you in advance.

 

There are only two HDD manufacturers today, Western Digital and seagate so pick whichever has the RPM and capacity you want. Hitachi was bought by WD and Samsung by Seagate.

The momentus XT are the fastest if you consider the SSD cache, followed by the scorpio blacks and then the Momentus 7200RPM.

 

Thanks for the info.

What is the highest capacity (of the fast drives you mention above), that can fit in a normal notebook? 1TB? 750GB?

 

Think the highest for 1tb is 5400rpm and for 750gb its 7200rpm.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

If you're going for an OS drive, get the 750GB 7.2K RPM, ideally the momentus XT. For data storage only 5.4K RPM is alright.

 

..I've always been very fond of the Spinpoint drives. They don't have the best transfer rates, but they excel on seek-times, low noise level, and heat signature. They also consistently last longer before any bad sectors show up, even when used by.. well.. careless people.. Seen that a lot.

If you care about this sort of thing, you can set the "acoustic noise" to a lower level at the cost of some performance via their switching tool. And add a jumper to "downgrade" to sata 1 signaling speeds. To save power, and reduce heat even more. So for a system with relatively large amounts of ram, that doesn't necessarily rely on virtual memory, that kind of thing, one of the new Spinpoint drives are a good choice.

For a second disk to an ssd, for example, you can't possibly pick a better hdd.

Another thing.. arguably, the hybrid disks might not always be worth it, since the flash storage tends to often have low write speed. You could imagine a scenario where you only have it for the boot, that then reduces the boot-time from.. you know.. 32 seconds, to 25 seconds. Resume might also work better if you place the saved image on the ssd, and have the page-file along with it. But personally I don't think it's worth the hassle, with an extra partition, with limited size, and the problems you get from that. At least if you run windows..

Specially if you're not looking for peak performance for a gaming laptop, and so on.