This is an experience question. Please don't reply, just vote in poll.

I am looking at upgrade options on a laptop with an on-board SATA150 controller. I currently have a 5400 rpm drive but it is a bit slow for my liking. I am therefore wondering what, if anything, to upgrade to. Whatever drive, it must be reliable and compatible with Linux first (I prefer Slackware), fast second. Price is part of the equation here, as is bang for the buck. As long as the drive is 160GB or larger, I should be fine.

Should I stay on my current 250GB SATA 5400rpm drive, upgrade to a SATA 7200rpm drive, or upgrade to a solid sate SATA drive?

The onboard controller is:

00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)

Hi,
Rather hard to answer via your poll!

I suppose you don't want a reply to this question since there is no representation within the poll?

I don't find a question or poll position to check for this question.

Your weighting for the poll is poor! The sample is rather narrow.

What is 'This is an experience question'? How can we help you with a poor poll or one that is not composed to cover your questions.

Basically, I couldn't resist!

How about I spent 15 years designing hard drives for IBM, Seagate and Maxtor -- but you just want me to vote in your poll?
If you are looking for statistics -- go to www.storagereview.com and read their user statistics -- which are far larger
than you will get here.

The 5400 rpm drives run cooler and consume less power -- both good things for laptops.
5400 is already fast for a laptop, while 7200 rpm lowers the latency for random read-writes, you
might not notice the difference for sustained transfers.

SSD loses the bang for the buck battle big time -- but runs cooler and is immune to head crashes, though
not to electronics failure -- which is more common than a head crash.

If it were me, I'd stick with 5400 rpm.

For notebook computers, it is best to think about power consumption. Noise is also an issue with notebooks. A 7200 RPM drive does produce more audible noise compared to 5400 RPM. A 5400 RPM consumes less power and produces less heat just to repeat what have been said. The problem with notebooks is you have no choice what brand and model that the manufacture picks for your notebook computer. The capacity is all you can pick.

Fujitsu hard drives are looking interesting on terms on performance (latency and throughput) and having low to reasonable power consumption. For example the Fujitsu MHZ2320BH (320 GB) has equal latency with a Western Digital Scropio Blue, but the Fujitsu consumes less power in most of the test. The following is a good benchmark on a few 320 GB SATA hard drives.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...d-roundup.html

My notebook has a Fujitsu hard drive and I am surprise of its performance and power consumption compared to other notebook hard drives.


I agree select 5400 RPM drives for notebooks.

What I vote for

I vote that you vote a thanks to member pccardout for that well argued and intelligent response.

Hi,
I agree the density is not comparable to the HDD of today. But SSD has several advantages over the mechanical drives of today.

Where do you get the statistics for the SSD? I don't see the electronics failure frequency for the SSD as being any worse than that for the interfaces of the mechanical drives. SSD density will be changing in the very near future since the technology is still evolving.

I don't use current SSD technology because of the cost but that will be changing soon.

Actually there are hidden problems with SSD. One is failure from power abrupt. If the device does not have a circuitry to minimize it, data can be loss and in some cases the SSD could fail to work next time. Another problem is SSD may not include ECC which hard drives have already. The complexity of ECC for SSD is different compared to ECC for hard drives. It is not easy to analyze surrounding data in a NAND Flash chip compared to HDD. ECC in SSD requires more room to save the data. Third problem is what everybody should know is limit amount of writes. Some file systems may have to write to about 50 to 100 times per file. If a SSD using NAND Flash memory that has a million writes, will be shorten to ten thousand or 10000 writes.

I would not use SSD until the limited writes become close to infinite. A HDD is basically has infinite writes until the mechanics fail and ferrite materials can hold the data for long periods of time.

Thanks for Electro for the inside scoop on SSD. While we're educating eachother -- actually Ferrite was abandoned in 1985 for both heads and
disks. For many years disks have been a CoPtCr alloy (with other exotic materials) and heads have gone through an incredible evolution -- as
I understand they now use Tunneling Magneto Resistance. But your point is still that they are magnetic materials, and are even called ferromagnetic
because they act like iron even if there is next to no iron in the mix. The latest evolution in disk materials and the transition from longitudinal
to perpindicular recording is that the bits were getting so close together and so small that they were on the verge of becoming self-erasing
from thermal effects. This problem has been pushed out by perpindicular recording. Among the problems now is that the fields required to
write data are so large that it is hard for heads to write. This does mean BTW, that silly little things like refrigerator magnets or
in fact ANY kind of magnet you see in ordinary life is far weaker than the magnetic coercivity of the disk -- you can't erase a hard
drive by putting it in your pocket with a magnet (though you can erase a credit card -- which still actually does use Ferrite!)