How to Choose Your Laptop Hard Drives

By Andreas Lee

laptop hard drive

When purchasing a laptop, you should consider laptop hard drives type rather than just pay attention on laptop specs. Have you ever felt while using the laptop, your laptop battery ran out of power very quickly especially when using lots of software or playing game for a long time, although you have selected a laptop which has long time use battery. Maybe when you bought the laptop, you didn’t pay attention on laptop hard drives type, SATA (ATA) drive or IDE drive.

Laptop hard drives SATA save your laptop battery power more, even if revolutions per minute (rpm) and the buffer cache size on some SATA drives are the same as the IDE drives specs. Based on my observations, even though laptop hard drives SATA have the same specifications with IDE drive but the performance of SATA drive is still faster.

Here I describe the specification which must be considered when choosing laptop hard drives:

Capacity

The data storage capacity in laptop hard drives. The larger the data storage capacity, the better the specification. I recommend choosing the large capacity laptop hard drives, since it can be data backup storage, and for the future in case you need more data storage.

Revolutions per second (RPM, r/m)

The number of disk component rotation in 1 minute. The greater the capacity, the greater the rpm. It’s better to choose 7200 rpm laptop hard drives for best performance.

Buffer cache size

Buffer cache is a temporary storage for files that have been used or read. The larger buffer cache size, the greater storage capacity, and the faster accessing back previously used files. Therefore choose the best buffer cache size if you want a laptop hard drives with the best specs.

If you already have a laptop and want to replace your laptop hard drive with a new one, make sure it is compatible with your laptop motherboard. I always remind you about this, because if you’ve already bought a laptop hard drive, usually you can not change with another hard drive if your laptop motherboard is not compatible.

Please check also my other guides on: 120GB hard disk drive, HDD, and hard drive camcorder.

Laptop Drives SATA

By Andreas Lee

One thing that people often take a look when buying a laptop (notebook) is laptop drives. The most frequently asked question is which laptop drives are best for my new laptop? The best answer is SATA drive. It has a better performance than the preceding IDE drive and a larger capacity, some have a 500 GB capacity.

Besides its performance and capacity which give advantage to SATA drive, you can also replace your laptop drives. It means that SATA drive is not installed permanently in your laptop.

If you already have a laptop and want to replace your old laptop drives with a new one, Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500 GB can provide the best performance for you.

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500 GB

laptop hard drive

This Seagate’s new product gives satisfaction for laptop drives performance needs these days. Its model is like ordinary laptop drives, but no need to doubt its performance. With hard drive technology developed by Seagate from generation to generation, long durability, 7200 rpm spindle speed, 16 MB buffer cache size, 300 MB transfer rate, and 500 GB capacity, Seagate Momentus gives 3 factors which are needed by computer users: Performance, Capacity, Durability.

High class transfer rate helps you to complete your task with minimum waiting time, and large capacity helps to fulfill your capacity needs in the long term. No need to worry about your laptop drives performance slowing down when transferring large amount of data at the same time. Seagate Momentus can do it for you.

The good news is 7200 rpm rotation speed saves your laptop battery. It is important to know that laptop drives which have 7200 rpm rotation speed saves your laptop battery more than laptop drives which have 5400 rotation speed.

Specs

• Capacity : 500 GB
• Buffer size : 16 MB
• Rotation speed : 7200 rpm
• Transfer speed : 300 MB
• Interface type : Serial ATA-300
• Features : G-Force Protection, QuietStep, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), Ramp Load, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR)

Take a look on another helpful information in: 2.5 inch hard drive, external disk drive, and computer hard drive explanation.

Data Treatment in Laptop Hard Drive

By Andreas Lee

laptop hard drives

Data Treatment influences laptop hard drive performance. By doing data treatment regularly, computer performance will not be decreased or slowed. Data treatment can be done through the defragmentation process. This process compresses the data and fills the empty spaces which left by deleted data, begins with the analyzing process, and followed by defragmentation process.

I recommend once a month to defrag your laptop hard drive, I review this once more because this is one simple way to treatment your data. To run effectively, disk defragmenter requires at least 15 % usable free space, so if hard drive capacity is almost full, back up some data first to external hard drive until it meets with free space requirement and then defrag your laptop hard drive.

Note: do not use any software, using Microsoft word, copying data, etc. when the defragmentation process takes place.

Steps to defrag hard drive:

• Double click on ‘my computer’.
• Right click on laptop hard drive which you want to defrag and select ‘properties’.
• Select tab ‘tools’ and press ‘defragment now’ button.
• In the Disk Defragmenter window, press ‘defragment’ button.

Defragmentation process requires a day if the laptop hard drive never been defrag before, even the process can take more than 24 hours (1 day) because there are many gaps (empty spaces) in the laptop hard drive. Each deleted data will leave gaps, especially when large sized data and large amount of data deleted frequently, or uninstalling software, so that the defragmentation process requires a long time to fill the gaps with used data. But if you defrag the hard drive once a month routinely, then the process will only take 15 – 30 minutes.

Take care on your laptop hard drive because its damage can cause your valuable data lost. For the better safety, often back up your valuable data to prevent any possibility that might occur.

I suggest you check out my other guide on: western digital hard drive and usb 8gb