Another era is about to come to an end. . .as does all things good or bad. . .

Hi there
I'm actually surprised they survived that long -- I can now get a 250 GB SSD for around 160 USD if I shop around and capacities will surely increase.

Also if you really think what you use a portable laptop for do you really need several TB of storage available at all times -- I have loads of HDD's on a home server but if I need more than the basic storage on an SSD when travelling with a laptop a small passport size self powered pocket USB3 2TB drive is more than enough for all the music / films / etc that I could even think of requiring.

Not my choice but a lot of people are also using cheap or even Free Cloud storage for several GB of data so the need for huge internal storage in a laptop really isn't required any more.

BTW these older larger capacity laptop drives should be available VERY CHEAPLY in the near future -- these can make very useful "External storage devices" with a SATA==>USB connector. I'll probably buy a slew of these as SSD's replace them in laptops -- and use these for archive / backup as they are small and conveniently storable.

I never actually thought that the 7200 rpm laptop disks performed significantly better than the older 5400 RPM ones ON A LAPTOP -- and they consumed more power -- the performance factor was far more dependent on the size of the Disk Cache.

In any case SSD's are so much better that I'm not surprised these are replacing HDD's in laptops -- and also being used as the Boot disk in a lot of workstations too. -- With Classical 3.5 inch internal desktop HDD's the 7200 RPM disks DO perform better than the 5400 RPM ones due to them always having a much larger cache).

If the cache is decently large for a "Spinner" the rate of spin isn't the significant factor since a decent I/O algorithm will tend to know what you will read / write next and ensure while the disk I/O is idle the hardware will move the blocks of data into the cache so when the CPU wants it it gets it from the much faster cache rather than read from the disk. If the cache is small then the data will have to be read from the physical disk track / cluster -- in this case a slower speed means a longer data access time.

Of course with an SSD there's no physical movement so of course data access will be VERY FAST.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

.....if you really think what you use a portable laptop for do you really need several TB of storage available at all times.........

Virtual Machines take up lots of space. I had to dump two VM Operating Systems just so I could expand the snapshots of my one W7 VM to include one with IE10.

Too bad SSDs just aren't there yet in terms of price per storage space.

UsernameIssues said:

jimbo45 said:

.....if you really think what you use a portable laptop for do you really need several TB of storage available at all times.........

Virtual Machines take up lots of space. I had to dump two VM Operating Systems just so I could expand the snapshots of my one W7 VM to include one with IE10.

Too bad SSDs just aren't there yet in terms of price per storage space.

Hi there
Just dump those VM's to one of those external USB3 2TB drives -- if you have a USB3 port on your computer the VM's will still perform just fine, even if you plug the USB3 disk into a USB2 port it will perform better than a bog standard USB2 drive anyway.

Those small 2 TB USB3 drives are now about 80 USD each --good value IMO.

(Note if you only have ONE USB3 port on a laptop USB3 Hubs are fine - but even if you don't have a USB3 port USB3 drives work in USB2 ports -- faster than a normal USB2 drive but obviously not at full USB3 speed though).

Cheers
jimbo

thx but I move around too much for that.
...but maybe I could stick it to the lid - I'm serious - I'd do that.

At least one or more VM ran all of the time on my old "spinner laptop" and I move the laptop from room to room a lot. The VMs are usually running hours of tests on stuff that I write for work. This laptop belongs to my employer and I had no say so in its build. I wish it had two internal drives: SSD and a spinner.

I've personally not had issues with 5400rpm laptop form factor HDDs, both in laptops and in external HDDs (Western Digital's newer "My Passport" drives report as 5200rpm!), but I can see why some people would want those faster access times for heavy-duty tasks they might be doing on their laptops.

SSDs are probably for the better on laptops though, SSDs are far more resilient to physical shock that HDDs are vulnerable to, especially in the mobile environment of a laptop.

I just ordered a new laptop, it comes with one 5400 RPM spinner in it. It has provision for two drives so I'll be putting at least one SSD in it for the OS.