Today more than ever it is important for a laptop to have a good hard drive. Modern processors on most laptops besides netbooks are fast enough to launch and run a web browser or office suite at warp speed. One of the major limiting factors therefor becomes how quickly your laptop can pull data from where it is currently hibernating. The bad news is that in order to reduce costs many modern laptops, from ultraportables to desktop replacements, use woefully slow hard drives. The good news is that upgrading your hard drive is about as easy as making macaroni and cheese. If you want a new laptop hard drive, read on, as I’ll round up my three favorite drives.
Ah, Western Digital. I love these guys. They have emerged as a clear leader in the mechanical hard drive world. Not only are their products fast, but they are also free of the sort of firmware fiascoes which have recently plagued drives from Seagate and Samsung.
The drive is case in point of why Western Digital is the leader of mechanical storage. Speed? Check. The 500GB Scorpio Blue is a 5,400RPM drive. It is not the fastest drive ever made for a laptop, but it provides good performance across all usage scenarios. Storage? Obviously, check. 500GB is a lot of storage for any system, and many users will never come close to filling it up. Price? Check. The Scorpio Blue 500GB drive typically costs around $90 dollars, which is on par with other competitors.
If there is anything bad that can be said about the drive it is that it does not absolutely excel in any one category. It is not the absolute faster or largest or cheapest. But it is a balanced all-rounder, a true jack of all trades, and it is the perfect drive for the average laptop user.
Intel has exploded into the solid state drive arena. Ask your average enthusiast two years ago who they thought would be the most successful at creating solid state drives and I don’t think anyone would say Intel. As it turns out, however, Intel’s skill in processors makes them a contender in solid state drives, as these types of drives are often more limited by controller on the drive than anything else.
The original drive was the best of the first round of solid state drives. Now Intel has debuted a new version. It is slightly faster than the old version and (once Intel sorts out the drivers) will fully support TRIM. In fact, the Intel X25M 80GB (and 160GB) drive is essentially the fastest drive you can possibly buy for a laptop. Both its random access performance and sustained transfer performance border on the absurd. There are situations where it is three or four times faster than the fastest mechanical drive.
Of course, the downside of all of this performance is price. The , which costs around $300 dollars, is not going to be large enough for many users. Going for the 160GB will set you back $550 clams. That is a lot of dough, so you’ll have to decide if the performance benefit is worth the cost.
Another Western Digital drive. Well, I did say that they were at the top of their game, didn’t I?
You’re probably wondering, then, what the difference is between the Scorpio Black and the Scorpio Blue. Western Digital users a color scheme to brand its product. Green products are low performance, but power miserly. Blue products are well-rounded. And black products are meant to provide the best possible performance. Being the black category, the drive has a faster 7,200RPM spindal speed and it also has twice as much cache as the Scorpio Blue drive.
What this means is performance that is around 15 or 20% quicker than the Scorpio Blue series. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, its because in some cases it isn’t. Certainly, it is slim when put in the light of an X-25M, which is hugely faster than any mechanical drive. However, 15 or 20% faster performance can be a big deal if you do a lot of transfers on big files, as you might if you’re using your computer as a desktop replacement. Western Digital has also priced the Scorpio Black right. The costs only $80 dollars, which is very affordable. If you want a laptop hard drive which straddles the line between speed and price, the Scorpio Black is a good bet.
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