Hard drive technical question
 

I'm looking at the Western Digital Scorpio Blue line. I've read in multiple places that the 500gb drive uses two 250gb platters. What I'm wondering is whether the the 250gb will end up being a single 250gb platter or does it not work like that? I'm debating between 250 gb and 320 gb since it's a very small price difference between the two.

Is there any performance advantage to going for a smaller capacity hard drive? I think the seek time will be lower? I don't really need 320gb, so if there's a decent advantage with the smaller capacity hd I'd rather go with that.

tia.

Hey V.

Check this out. This should help a lot.
How to Buy a Hard Drive - PC World

First thing; I would stay away from WD. Had too many dead disk from them. I trust Hitachi or Seagate.
What do you mean by 'it will end up 250gb platter"?

Get a 1 TB drive, they are under $70 these days.

:iagree: and if you can get the drive with 7200RPM
16GB Cache and an Oxford 924 chip it will be very
very fast.

Is the problem with WD units coming DOA or long-term reliability?

I really like the Seagate drives performance wise, but the Seagate drives seem to be a little noisier and vibrating more compared to the WD, esp their 7200 Momentus and that's something I can't deal with in a laptop. Then again, most of the owners complaining about that are using Mac's whereas this is going in a T60. Maybe I should order both and keep the one I like.

Long term reliability. In my experience WD is noisiest of all.
Hitachi has been my best experience for laptops.

Western Digital releases 1TB laptop hard drive | Crave - CNET

Be careful, the new WD's *might* not fit in a 2.5" slot.

Whatever you buy, buy an external drive as large as you can afford, back up your primary data at least once a week if not daily, it's as simple as a scheduled copy from the internal to the external.

I've had very good experience with WD HDD's, there was a period where they had a reliability issue, but that was a long time ago. You can buy WD's, they're fine. Every HDD manufacturer has had an rep issue along the way.

As always, get teh fastest RPM drive you can, don't worry about how many platters there are, I can't imagine you having an application that will be significantly affected or take advantage of a laptop hard drive read/seek/write times based on # of platters. RPM and cache are the 2 biggest features you should be concerned about.

WD are noisier drive, I have had luck with them in terms of problems.


( desktop) I use Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA
as the main drive only because of the performance,
Like the others had mention backup frequently.

Ok I'm set on the 7200 320gig WD Scorpio Black.

After doing some research it seems to be a no-brainer because Seagate quality seems to have gone down the drain and have terrible customer service + their 2.5" hd's produce more noise and vibration. Pity, because they seem to perform very well. The Hitachi 7200rpm notebook hd's run much hotter. Searching on thinkpadforums also suggests that the Seagate's have more compatibility issues.

I was torn between 5400 and 7200 with WD because it's only something like a $13 difference on Amazon between the two, but didn't want extra heat and lower battery life. But I found this. The faster drive (with double the cache) is quieter and uses less power, go figure.

I don't actually need a 320gb hd, but it's cheaper than the 250. There's no such thing like having too large a hd and having a lot of it empty, slowing things down is there? I'd guess not, but don't want to find out about something like that after getting it.

Vig: very low tech here, but between a couple three big thumb drives, and a Toshiba
320G portable hard drive, I keep large amounts of data, docs, financials and lots of
photos easily, with room to spare...
Dunno your application/needs, but this stuff is pretty bulletproof in my limited
experience.
GL,mD