Laptop Hard Drive Guide

Laptops use smaller 2.5 inch drives for data storage due to limited physical space for standard size 3.5 inch hard drives. The 2.5 and 3.5 inch measurements refer to the size of the circular disk platters inside the housing.

The small physical size limits storage capacity because of smaller surface area per platter and fewer platters, manufacturers also have to consider battery usage and noise so most laptop drives use slower rotational speeds of 4200 RPM or 5400 RPM. Larger cache memory of 8mb is used on many drives (but not all) to help offset the slower speeds.

Fortunately technology is catching up and there are laptop hard drives with capacities of 60 GB to 80 GB which is great for multimedia storage or applications. Higher RPM really helps give that snappy feeling when opening applications or booting up, Hitachi is the only manufacturer I am aware of that currently offers a 2.5 inch 7200 RPM internal hard drive.

Internal or External Hard Drive?

Upgrading the internal hard drive is great for an overall speed boost but laptop drives are still fairly expensive for the sizes available.

If you just need more storage space then an external hard drive that links up through the USB 2.0 or Firewire port is a great alternative, not only can you get twice the capacity for approximately the same price but many also run at 7200 RPM and have 8mb of cache.

Huge or fast external drives need an external power source rather than being powered from the firewire or USB port, this may hinder mobility in some cases but these ports just don't provide enough power. Some of the slower RPM or smaller capacity external hard drives can be powered off just the interface but the price starts to go up because these are usually 2.5 inch laptop drives housed in an external enclosure.

Drive Connections

Laptop hard drives use the same basic technology as regular drives but have a slightly different connection. A 3.5 inch IDE drive uses a 40 pin ribbon cable and 4 pin molex connector while a 2.5 inch IDE drive uses a 44 pin connection, the extra 4 pins replace the seperate bulky power plug.

Firewire and USB 2.0 support can be found side by side on the same external drive and on laptops these days, when it comes to performance they are about the same with firewire leading in terms of throughput and less CPU utilization.

You may need an inexpensive 6 pin to 4 pin Firewire converter since many laptops only have the 4 pin connection while the drives may have 6 pin connections.

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