What is the best notebook drive for a normal user?

I'm giving a friend of mine a couple of my was-being-superceded notebooks to help her out a bit. I will be, however, taking out the SSD's.

Use is new business - lots of Office I guess, web, social networking, i.e. what mere mortals do most of the time with their computers, not exactly high intensity. Absolute price cap = let's say 150€.

Momentus XT the best choice? Or overkill for normal user?

 

I mean normal use a 5400 rpm drive is sufficient. Most 7200 rpm drives barely boot faster than a 5400 rpm, and the extra heat is noticeable.

 

Yeah 5400RPM is fine. 250GB more that sufficient. However, 7200RPM can't hurt. Unless the computer is poorly ventilated, heat really shouldn't be a problem.

 

Performance champs are Momentus XT and WD Black 750GB.

Samsung HM320HJ is a nice 320GB single platter 7200rpm drive.

 

If you want to keep your friend 'status', I would only consider a Hitachi 7K500 500GB model (or higher... such as an XT @ 500GB also, or a Scorpio Black 750GB model).


5400 RPM drives are yesterday's 'junk' and use just as much power or more (to do the same amount of work) than the above mentioned 7200 RPM models do and will take twice the time to do it too.

I had and swore by an Scorpio Blue 500GB model that I had the (misfortune) to run into again last week. God! Talk about slow! And to think that that drive is what replaced the horrible 7200.4's 500GB Seagates - and was better than all of them (I tried and returned 4 Seagates .4's).

For your price point I would be looking at the Scorpio Black 750GB - partitioned to ~100GB C: and the rest as data for her.

Not only will she have a fairly modern platform to start her business with - but you'll also save hours on any maintenance I am guessing you will have to do on this system in the future too.

5400 RPM drives in 2011? Not even to my worst enemy.

The system as a whole will be much more valuable to her with a balanced set of hardware inside (you are giving her 8GB RAM and Win7x64 Ultimate too, right? ) and this will allow her to keep this system for as long as possible (yrs for her usage) and let you sell your next 'was-being-superceded notebooks' for a fair and profitable price in the future.

Even mere 'mortals' need 7200 RPM drives and less than 500GB capacities are simply another form of punishment.

 

I'd say a "normal user" should get either the cheapest drive because they may not care or notice the difference, or an SSD. Why SSD? Because, nothing makes "normal usage" pop more than an SSD. If the user won't need much in the way of data storage, then just get something cheap and small. For instance, Newegg has a 64GB Kingston SSD for under $70 after rebate. It uses a JMF618 controller, so it isn't the best but is still a lot better than any HDD.

 

Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Core 2 Duo and a Core i3, not to even talk about the difference between a 5400 rpm and a 7200 rpm. And unless you are copying mass amounts of data, the difference is very minimal. My Z61t originally had a 100GB 7200 rpm Seagate drive which I replaced with a 640GB 5400 rpm Seagate, and there is no difference I can see.

 

So wrong on so many levels. Sigh...

Try to compare at the same capacity points - the difference is huge (over 60% in 'benchmarks' and time-wise more than twice as slow).

 

Here are some real world benchmarks between the 750GB Black and 750GB Blue:
Western Digital's Scorpio Black 750GB notebook hard drive - The Tech Report - Page 6

The 750GB Blue is a rather slow hard drive. Comparing the WD 500GB Black with Blue the differences are even smaller.

7200rpm makes a bigger difference for people that do disk intensive multi tasking a lot. Going by the Vogelbung's description I don't think this specific user does.

 

When doing single (benchmarks) they seem almost okay.

When using them on a live system and trying to get the same work done (updating the O/S, rebooting and updating important apps, for example - something every user does or should do) the 5400 RPM drives are the 4200 RPM equivalents of 2001 era tech.

There, (in the real world) they easily take twice as long - if not longer - to do the same work.

The reason why the smaller capacity drives show smaller (benchmark) differences is (as I've stated before) that the drive heads need to be much less accurate to lock onto a track on the platter than the bigger/denser capacity platter drive's heads need to be. Simple physics.

 

Shouldn't platter densities also play a role in what the user perceives as a "fast" drive and not just plain old rpm's?

 

i would go with at least the momentus xt, or an ssd, if there aren't storage requirements that forbid it. then, i would, again, go xt.

5400 drives suck. ordinary 7200 drives suck, too, but less so.

and just because people wouldn't understand it, they would still notice "bah, my laptop is slow". you can give them the fastest best performing cpu, biggest ram, best gpu, and everything, and they still think "this thing is dog slow" because of the hdd.

 

Yes, I would only recommend drives with at least 250GB per platter.

 

OK, I think I'll go with the XT. I gave the one I bought to try away recently, so I'll buy another and see if there are any issues with using it in the notebooks - if not, I'll get another.

 

Good choice imo. Not sure if you know but updating the firmware to SD25 is recommended.

 

Well, in my personaly opinion the XT is not really that big of a deal.
It's more expensive than many other quality 7200rpm HDD's and to be honest the only area where you will see the speed with the XT is in the boot-up and starting regular programs.
For now, I'd still stick to a quality 7200rpm HDD such as the Hitachi Travelstar 7k500 or WD Scorpio Black 750GB (depending on the amount of capacity your friend needs).

Also... make sure to partition it into 2 sections, one for the OS/programs, the other for storage (for data keeping etc. - just in case something happens to the OS so it can be easily killed and you can do a fresh install without losing data - though a lot of the people on these forums already know this, I felt it would be prudent to point it out).

SSD's are still too expensive and I won't personally touch them until they lower the prices significantly.

 

well, the trick is to not reboot your system all the time, then the xt will cache more important stuff. standby ftw. instant-on like on a phone or those hip tablets, but with a laptop.

to not buy an ssd because it's expensive, how does it feel to tell that to oneself, knowing one could have one since long by now, and enjoying what i do

just kidding.

and i only create one partition. but it depends on the kind of user. those that love to mess up their os without ability to revert to a working state, those should have two partitions. others, only external backup is needed (for hardware defects mostly)

 

No need. I'm giving her one of my WHS's (Oh, and actually recoverable backups trump some ridiculous notion about separating OS and data for the purposes of recoverability - though a lot of the people on these forums already know this, I felt it would be prudent to point out.)