Misc. Ramblings

For those looking to boost laptop performance, one area to upgrade is the hard drive. Due to battery power consumption and price considerations, laptops use relatively low capacity and relatively slow hard drives. Indeed, on the budget end of most laptop lines you will most likely find cheap 4,200 RPM disks with small 2MB buffers. Upgrading one of these drives can lead to substantial speed gains when working with a typical office suite of applications according to tests reported by Storage Solutions of several laptop hard drives. The downsides? Cost and shorter endurance times before you have to recharge the batteries of your laptop.

Only you can decide what tradeoff you are willing to live with but if you choose to upgrade your hard drive the Storage Solutions review seems to indicate it may be worthwhile. Although no test can be exhaustive of every type of drive available, I think the Storage Solutions test covers the major players: Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital.

As one would expect, for the most part, the faster the spindle speed, the higher the performance. Hence, it should come as no surprise that the Hitachi Travelstar model 7K100 7,200rpm disk comes out on top for most of the tests.

The problem is, the Hitachi costs about $200USD for 80GB of storage. As a comparison, in the desktop world you could get a 300GB drive for about the same price. So, although you can gain a speed increase by switching from a 4,200rpm drive up to a 7,200, the cost will also be relatively substantial. If that equation works for you, then the Hitachi is probably the way to go.