1tb Laptop Drives

[mnbcm]

Did you see the news this week about the higher capacity drives ready to hit the market? 1TB laptop drives! I can't wait to pick one of these up. I'm sick of lugging around my 3.5" external drive and trying to find places to plugin.

Hitachi is releasing a 2TB 3.5" 7,200RPM drive too.

Edited August 8, 2009 by mnbcm

[dave_boo]

Check out their height...you may only have space for a 9mm drive.

[mnbcm]

Check out their height...you may only have space for a 9mm drive.

Good point, most laptops can't fit these internally because they are 12.5mm, but I'm sure there are external enclosures that will fit.

[nikster]

they will be released inside a WD external enclosure (thai: box) at first...

and yes most laptops don't fit these, unless you have a gaming monster, or other monster.

MacBook Pro might fit them - the jury is out on it. The older 17" certainly. For the newer ones, we'll have to wait until the drive is released. Some guys claim they can fit, others claim they can't. But no one has the drive so no one knows for sure.

Expect a 667MB 9.5mm drive to follow shortly (2 platters instead of 3, same bit density as the 1TB)...

[knortyboy]

Asus VXS is available now, at a price(£1999) with 1TB of storage.

[britmaveric]

dont need that sort of space on a notebook.

[john b good]

dont need that sort of space on a notebook.

What's the difference. Some folk only run a laptop so if the space is OK for a PC why not a laptop.

Personally for me a laptop is now all aboubt weight (everything else being equal) and I wouldn't go for a laptop with a big drive if it is gonna weigh like a brick.

But at the end of the day it's horses for courses.

[hansnl]

Did you see the news this week about the higher capacity drives ready to hit the market? 1TB laptop drives! I can't wait to pick one of these up. I'm sick of lugging around my 3.5" external drive and trying to find places to plugin.

Hitachi is releasing a 2TB 3.5" 7,200RPM drive too.

I also wonder what kind of data people have on their HD's, and why so much?

1TB, 2TB, 3TB,..........I have a 240 something GB HD, plenty of room, use about half, even making programs/

And what is the craze about laptops.

Even people never using it outside the house want a laptop.

As for an external drive, got me a HD in a small format enclosure, USB 2.0, size 11,5 cm x 6,5 cm x 1,4 cm, 500 GB

"Lugging" that around means I put it in my pocket.

[filingaccount]

I can't wait until we have Terabyte SSD's as standard.

For the ones wondering why laptops are popular, the reasons are probably some or all of the below.

1. Physical size. Eg. doesn't need it's own desk.

2. Easy to maintain and clean.

3. Silent.

4. Power consumption.

5. Price (particularly netbooks).

6. Option to bring with you on travels or even to your friends house to show the latest pictures, videos etc. Not everyone knows how to transfer large files or how to properly burn optical media.

Laptops are powerful enough to be the main computer people use today. What has been lacking is large capacity drives resulting in an array of external drives in many cases. Good thing they are finally getting to larger drives.

What are stored on any computer with large capacity? Media. Home video's and images. Lots and lots of downloaded media (not necessarily illegal, as the assumption would be. This is a discussion for another time).

[cali]

For the ones wondering why desktops are popular, the reasons are probably some or all of the below.

1. Gaming. Laptop graphics performance is poor. Desktop cards give great frame rates and stunning quality even on big displays.

2. CPU power & RAM. You can get much more powerful chips with more cores and at least double the memory and get very high speed RAM.

3. Easier to maintain and clean. Covers come off without taking out 30 screws. Parts are all modular from the motherboard to the power supply. Everything is an easy to find component that anyone can swap out or service with similar parts.

4. More silent than laptops. If you want quiet, a big fan running low RPM's is quieter than a small fan that must run faster to move the same amount of air.

5. Price. Spec per spec desktop parts are cheaper

6. Upgrades. Over time you have more flexibility to upgrade things like the video card or oversized hard drives like this one or the velociraptor. Most laptops you are stuck with a lot of the critical components.

I can't wait until we have Terabyte SSD's as standard.

Could be a long wait. Don't let the SSD marketing people fool you. The disadvantages of SSD are:

1. Performance. While static benchmarks say one thing, real world tells another story. Many are finding that as SSD's run for extended amounts of time they become slower than hard drives. Some SSD's also have occasional long pauses too that lock up the system which annoys gamers and server administrators alike. These problems are being addressed by firmware, technology changes, and Windows 7 enhancements. But right now it's not cut and dry.

2. Power consumption. Reviewers like to compare power consumption of working drives where SSD's consume less power than hard drives. The thing of it is for most people, drives are idle most of the time. SSD's consume more power than hard drives when idle and thus draw more power overall in that case. SSD also has a terrible delimma that to double capacity they must double memory chips. Each time you do that it sucks more power and nearly doubles the price and you have to fit them.

3. Form factor. For the same capacity, hard drives are smaller. There is a 1TB SSD, but it goes in a 3.5" drive bay!

4. Reliability. Hard drives are a stable technology. SSD's have a lot of bugs and failings. All you need to do to validate this is compare their end user reviews. Not uncommon to find 2 and 3 star satisfaction ratings on SSD where hard drives get 4 or 5.

5. Capacity. SSD's available today are too small for many peoples needs and lag well behind hard drives.

6. Price always wins. In the 1980's SSD's were touted as the upcoming big thing that were going to crush hard drives. 20 years later and it's the same story. SSD goes for dollars per gig and hard drives go pennies per gig so you won't find many people who want to pay more than the price of their computer to put a SSD in especially considering all the downsides

[nikster]

The desktop vs laptop debate is pointless. Use what you like.

I am on a MacBook Pro 17", it lasts 7 hours on battery (they claim 8 but oh well, reality interferes), I never wait for the CPU. The main performance difference to any desktop is the hard disk - desktop HDs are way bigger and faster. But SSDs will remove this difference. They outperform the fastest desktop hard drives on a factor anywhere from 2x - 30x, depending on the task.

The MBP is silent. Even under stress, you have to be in a very quiet room to hear the fans. Under normal conditions, you can't hear it at all.

Gaming - sure there'll always be gamers, and they'll want the fastest graphics cards and desktops. CPU isn't that much of an issue, but the high end GPUs generate too much heat to live in laptops. If I was into gaming I'd probably get an XBOX or a Wii though.

As to why do we need to much storage: Only reason is that we collect TV series and films. I have over 200GB of movies and series. Now I can keep them on an external HD (and I do) but I'd much rather carry it all around with me. Mainly because then I wouldn't have to worry about bit rot or backing these up, they'd get backed up along with my normal backups, every day. It would save time. I guess I could instead get a networked RAID-1 mirrored setup, that would work too. But it's expensive, haven't done that yet.

Even without video, my 320GB hard drive is 75% full - that's not good as performance degrades once it gets over 50%. So a 1TB drive would help. Alternatively, and this is what I am going to do, you can replace the DVD drive with a second 500GB HD, and use the second HD as a storage monster. And maybe install a fast small SSD for boot and apps.

@call - SSDs are not bigger, in general. Just way more expensive, and you are right, the price gap is not about to close. Neither is the performance gap though power consumption is about equal though I think SSDs have a lot of untapped potential here.

Edited August 10, 2009 by nikster

[dave_boo]

For the ones wondering why desktops are popular, the reasons are probably some or all of the below.

1. Gaming. Laptop graphics performance is poor. Desktop cards give great frame rates and stunning quality even on big displays.

When there's beasts of laptops like the Asus W90vp offering dual 4870s you don't have to worry about that much.

2. CPU power & RAM. You can get much more powerful chips with more cores and at least double the memory and get very high speed RAM.

Now that the i7 is out, you're quite correct. However, I have a 2,5 GHZ dual core laptop that is dam_n near as speedy on transcodes as my quad core workstation. Also, there are laptops offering from 6-8 GB of ram now, and considering that you can get up to 1066 mhz, how much of a delta is there?

3. Easier to maintain and clean. Covers come off without taking out 30 screws. Parts are all modular from the motherboard to the power supply. Everything is an easy to find component that anyone can swap out or service with similar parts.

4. More silent than laptops. If you want quiet, a big fan running low RPM's is quieter than a small fan that must run faster to move the same amount of air.

5. Price. Spec per spec desktop parts are cheaper

6. Upgrades. Over time you have more flexibility to upgrade things like the video card or oversized hard drives like this one or the velociraptor. Most laptops you are stuck with a lot of the critical components.

Could be a long wait. Don't let the SSD marketing people fool you. The disadvantages of SSD are:

1. Performance. While static benchmarks say one thing, real world tells another story. Many are finding that as SSD's run for extended amounts of time they become slower than hard drives. Some SSD's also have occasional long pauses too that lock up the system which annoys gamers and server administrators alike. These problems are being addressed by firmware, technology changes, and Windows 7 enhancements. But right now it's not cut and dry.

The writes do get slower, especially on cheaper SSD. The SSD that pause for a great length of time are also the cheap ones that have a crappy controller. Note that this is WRITES only....except for save games a decent SSD should exhibit no pauses and be better than a HDD.

2. Power consumption. Reviewers like to compare power consumption of working drives where SSD's consume less power than hard drives. The thing of it is for most people, drives are idle most of the time. SSD's consume more power than hard drives when idle and thus draw more power overall in that case. SSD also has a terrible delimma that to double capacity they must double memory chips. Each time you do that it sucks more power and nearly doubles the price and you have to fit them.

Where did you get that information that the SSD draws as much power at idle as it does at use? Intel lists their X-25M as drawing 0,06 watts at idle and 0,15 watts at load. Compare that to WD Scorpio line which has an idle draw of 0,85 watts....easy to see that even if you were constantly writing to the Intel you'd still draw less power than the HDD would use even if it was only idling.

3. Form factor. For the same capacity, hard drives are smaller. There is a 1TB SSD, but it goes in a 3.5" drive bay!

There's 2,5" 1 TB SSD drives out....whether you or I can justify the cost is a different story.

4. Reliability. Hard drives are a stable technology. SSD's have a lot of bugs and failings. All you need to do to validate this is compare their end user reviews. Not uncommon to find 2 and 3 star satisfaction ratings on SSD where hard drives get 4 or 5.

B'ah...customer reviews....they buy a Lexmark drive and expect Intel performance.

5. Capacity. SSD's available today are too small for many peoples needs and lag well behind hard drives.

6. Price always wins. In the 1980's SSD's were touted as the upcoming big thing that were going to crush hard drives. 20 years later and it's the same story. SSD goes for dollars per gig and hard drives go pennies per gig so you won't find many people who want to pay more than the price of their computer to put a SSD in especially considering all the downsides

There are good points you made, just wanted to clarify some things.

The desktop vs laptop debate is pointless. Use what you like.

I am on a MacBook Pro 17", it lasts 7 hours on battery (they claim 8 but oh well, reality interferes), I never wait for the CPU. The main performance difference to any desktop is the hard disk - desktop HDs are way bigger and faster. But SSDs will remove this difference. They outperform the fastest desktop hard drives on a factor anywhere from 2x - 30x, depending on the task.

The MBP is silent. Even under stress, you have to be in a very quiet room to hear the fans. Under normal conditions, you can't hear it at all.

Exception to the rule. Try and rip a dvd and surf the net or watch a movie; how quiet is it then?

Gaming - sure there'll always be gamers, and they'll want the fastest graphics cards and desktops. CPU isn't that much of an issue, but the high end GPUs generate too much heat to live in laptops. If I was into gaming I'd probably get an XBOX or a Wii though.

And miss out on all those excellent PC games (oh, wait, forgot you run OSX ).

As to why do we need to much storage: Only reason is that we collect TV series and films. I have over 200GB of movies and series. Now I can keep them on an external HD (and I do) but I'd much rather carry it all around with me. Mainly because then I wouldn't have to worry about bit rot or backing these up, they'd get backed up along with my normal backups, every day. It would save time. I guess I could instead get a networked RAID-1 mirrored setup, that would work too. But it's expensive, haven't done that yet.

I'm going to keep chanting my mantra; get tape people! You can find cheap drives and the performance on newer tapes is phenomenal. Plus their life far surpasses that of other goods.

Even without video, my 320GB hard drive is 75% full - that's not good as performance degrades once it gets over 50%. So a 1TB drive would help. Alternatively, and this is what I am going to do, you can replace the DVD drive with a second 500GB HD, and use the second HD as a storage monster. And maybe install a fast small SSD for boot and apps.

@call - SSDs are not bigger, in general. Just way more expensive, and you are right, the price gap is not about to close. Neither is the performance gap though power consumption is about equal though I think SSDs have a lot of untapped potential here.

[MarleyMarl]

I also wonder what kind of data people have on their HD's, and why so much?

1TB, 2TB, 3TB,..........I have a 240 something GB HD, plenty of room, use about half, even making programs/

And what is the craze about laptops.

Even people never using it outside the house want a laptop.

As for an external drive, got me a HD in a small format enclosure, USB 2.0, size 11,5 cm x 6,5 cm x 1,4 cm, 500 GB

"Lugging" that around means I put it in my pocket.

Movies, TV Shows, Games, Music - you can download complete TV Series that might be 5gb, and if you want HD movies they might be 5gb a pop.

For me my macbook is great because I travel alot, and I like to be able to work on my sofa or bed every now and then. I would still like a desktop though.

A powerful desktop comes alot cheaper than a powerful laptop, and most of all new technology comes out for desktop first.

[Wolfie]

So my 6TB of external storage (plus almost 2TB of internal storage) might seem a tad excessive to some of you guys then?

[nikster]

@dave boo - believe it or not you can't hear the MacBook Pro. Transcoded an AVI file to DVD once - the fans will come on but stay around 4000 RPM which is like a faint whirring sound. In any case, if you do that kind of thing on a desktop you'll get something that sounds like a small airplane taking off so not sure what this is supposed to mean.

Tape drives - too difficult to access the data. What if the drive breaks 5 years from now? Good luck finding spare parts. The idea with the HDs is that it's easy to migrate to another HD, so you buy a new one every few years and move all stuff over.

As for gaming - I really don't have an opinion. Don't care.

More storage = better. No matter how much storage I have, there seems to be a law of nature that says that within a few months, I will be at 75% capacity. If I had 6TB like the wolf, I am sure I'd have 4TB of data by now...

[dave_boo]

@dave boo - believe it or not you can't hear the MacBook Pro. Transcoded an AVI file to DVD once - the fans will come on but stay around 4000 RPM which is like a faint whirring sound. In any case, if you do that kind of thing on a desktop you'll get something that sounds like a small airplane taking off so not sure what this is supposed to mean.

I'd believe it; Apple's products have always been pretty nice. However, I'm poor too mutt and can't afford them. Watercooled workstations don't have the noise problem...

Tape drives - too difficult to access the data. What if the drive breaks 5 years from now? Good luck finding spare parts. The idea with the HDs is that it's easy to migrate to another HD, so you buy a new one every few years and move all stuff over.

The problem with the line of thinking that you'll just migrate the data over from your old drive to your new drive every couple of years is that you never know when a drive is going to crap out. Could it take a nose dive before you get the data transfered, or even worst during the transfer (a problem that's getting worst for those running RAID arrays)? And what's to stop you from buy a new tape drive every couple of years? Even better, LTO, the current darling, has the requirement to read data from the past two generations and write to the previous one...so buying a newer drive shouldn't be a problem!

As for gaming - I really don't have an opinion. Don't care.

It was just a gentle jab at your choice of OS...but anything I can play on my Linux box you can play on your OSX box so maybe better if I just shutup about that!

More storage = better. No matter how much storage I have, there seems to be a law of nature that says that within a few months, I will be at 75% capacity. If I had 6TB like the wolf, I am sure I'd have 4TB of data by now...

Nature abhors a vaccum old chap.

[namoo]

Dead Technology. SSD is the future, I think by this time next year. SSD will be standard.

already at 500GB in 2.5" form factor.

[cali]

Dead Technology. SSD is the future, I think by this time next year. SSD will be standard.

already at 500GB in 2.5" form factor.

Gee the marketing people at SSD are amazing. They have all you gullible people believing everything they say. Now enlighten us why SSD failed to win over users for the last 20 years? Today 500GB SSD costs 53,000 baht. A comparable notebook hard drive is less than 3000. How many people are going to fork out the extra 50,000 baht? Right...

Think SSD is extending battery life? The SSD Power Consumption Hoax

Think the "good" SSD's are totally stable? Intel Issues SSD Firmware Fix for Data Corruption

SSD has a long, long way to go in becoming as good as a hard drive. 20 years on and they are still kind of a joke.

Edited August 12, 2009 by cali

[namoo]

SSD has a long, long way to go in becoming as good as a hard drive.

A comparable notebook hard drive is less than 3000

How does a 5400rpm hard drive 500gb comparable to a SSD?

Can you expand on what benefits a standard mechanical hard drive has over SSD apart from price and at the moment capacity?

Please note ref your outdated intel firmware problem this has already been addressed by intel with a non-destructive firmware update patch for Gen2 drives that takes 20 seconds to do. Please google 1.5tb seagate firmware update to show that HD are not immune to issues with firmware. Seagate addressed this patch but resulted in all your data loss.

As far as I am aware SSD provide:

1. 5-10x the random read/write and sequential read/write of a 7200rpm hard drive.

2. There are no moving parts on a SSD subject to failure.

3. Noise (silent) and heat is much less than a mechanical drive. Take a 5 drive HD Raid and compare it to a SSD Raid, Bliss on heat and noise

4. Firmware upgradable without destruction of data stored.

5. Reduced power usage therefore better for your battery and the environment (despite what that website states) there are many sources that prove it does. Including my own experience on macbook pros results in about 20 mins longer with SSD than 7200rpm drive and about 15mins with Raid0 SSD. You only need to look at the Watts used for operating and idle for an SSD compared to the Watts used for mechanical drive - its simple physics.....

6. Boot time is obviously reduced as is application launching and copying large files - therefore making users more efficient and less wasted time than a HD and making their workflow more efficient.

7. New algorithms and firmware from both OCZ and Intel have reduced the performance decrease over time that early firmware were susceptible to.

8. Defrag of an SSD is not required now to maintain performance unlike conventional HD.

I really cannot see the benefit of HD in the coming months other than price/capacitiy. This time next year they will be standard and I am pretty sure any laptop u buy towards the end of next year will be SSD - Standard.

Look at the price drop of the Intel SSD Gen2 160GB $449, 256GB SSD $550.00. The price of SSD's looks to be halving every 6 months. So if the rate continues SSD prices will be on par with HD prices this time next year. Your paying twice the price of a fast 300GB (Velociraptor 10000RPM) for 4x the performance of this drive...looks like a good ratio does it not?

I look forward with interest to your list of benefits of mechanical HD over SSD. The reason they have not taken off is the cost of production up until now of large capacity SSD was not justifiable - however that has all changed and they are becoming the norm - let's look at some of the manufacturers that give it as option, it was not so long ago that 7200rpm/5400rpm were options for laptop sellers - where as 5400rpm/7200rpm is the standard.

DELL

APPLE

ALIENWARE

SAGER

IBM

ACER

ASUS

I don't think they are all wrong thinking that SSD is a failed technology that will not take off.

Lets check back on this thread 12 months from now and see if you have changed your mind Mr Call - I think you are living in the past and will not accept new technology.

Hard drives for certain tasks will be here for a long time to come. But in the mobile market and indeed performance workstation environment - they will die out.

Edited August 12, 2009 by namoo

[Wolfie]

How does a 5400rpm hard drive 500gb comparable to a SSD?

Can you expand on what benefits a standard mechanical hard drive has over SSD apart from price and at the moment capacity?

Your average consumer looks at these two elements specifically when choosing hardware - why by a drive that is 2x 3x or 4x the price for half the capacity?

Its only the real geeks that would go for SSD at the present time. I consider myself a geek but i would not choose SSD over a traditional HD at the moment, i just cant justify paying more $$$ for less storage,

Power consumption - wall mounted plugs are plentiful

Increased Read/Write speed - not really an issue as i am patient enough to wait the extra second or so for my data

No moving parts to fail - SSD will present its own set of challenges (failure points)

Noise - i've not really found much noise on any HD except for maybe the fan noise on my 2TB external monster

Firmware upgradeable - i dont think i have ever had to upgrade a firmware on a traditional HD in my 20+ years of using computers

Boot time increased (speculation) - Again, im patient enough to wait that extra few seconds for my computer/laptop to boot up and become ready

Reduced Performance Decrease - not really a selling point for SSD - it was a flaw in the earlier models that the manufactures are fixing

Defrag - My base unit defrags on a scheduler overnight - ive never seen it as i am always asleep - i dont remember the last time i had to initiate a defrag actually.

I'm not against SSD, and i beleive that at some point in the future it will replace the traditional disk style HD, but for now its technology that is not refined, still expensive and not ready for the average consumer. Once the capacity and prices fall it will become the defacto standard for Laptop drives and soon after that it may even replace high capacity drives on base units, but whilst traditional HD's are cheap and ahead of SSD in terms of capacity, it will always be a 'two horse race'

[namoo]

You have to look at the big picture. Look at the average price reduction on SSD per month and the rapid increase in capacity.

Like I said before this time next year they will be mainstream. I would put money on it.