SSD performance vs 7200rpm for Laptop...

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FM 3370

Gawd
Joined
Jun 29, 2002
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I love my Samsung 830 256GB SSD drive but as I found myself looking for an external storage drive I asked myself "Why not just get a large 2TB 7200rpm HDD for my laptop and take a slight performance hit?"

So in the grand scheme of things would getting a 7200rpm drive for my laptop over an SSD cause much of a performance decrease in speed? My friend has an older HP laptop with a 7200 rpm drive in it, running Windows 8 it seems to be pretty snappy which surprised me.
 
It would be more than a slight hit IMHO. Why don't you put the SSD in the laptop and get a HDD caddy to go where your DVD drive is? I don't personally use CD/DVDs in my laptop ever so I bought a drive caddy and run a SSD & HDD in my laptop.
 
ziggo0 said:
It would be more than a slight hit IMHO. Why don't you put the SSD in the laptop and get a HDD caddy to go where your DVD drive is? I don't personally use CD/DVDs in my laptop ever so I bought a drive caddy and run a SSD & HDD in my laptop.
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It's an "ultraportable" Lenovo X120e so not possible. I would definitely do that it I could, that would be perfect.
 
HDDs as the main drive pretty much sucks in any computer now days.

Not only is is going to be slower, but your are going to take a hit on battery performance as well.

And let's talk about installing Windows updates. With a HDD, you are going to see a hit of at least 3-4x more time spent to install those updates when compared to an SSD.

Same goes for any software install/uninstall/update as well, especially when dealing with a lot of small files.
 
FM 3370 said:
I love my Samsung 830 256GB SSD drive but as I found myself looking for an external storage drive I asked myself "Why not just get a large 2TB 7200rpm HDD for my laptop and take a slight performance hit?"

So in the grand scheme of things would getting a 7200rpm drive for my laptop over an SSD cause much of a performance decrease in speed? My friend has an older HP laptop with a 7200 rpm drive in it, running Windows 8 it seems to be pretty snappy which surprised me.
Click to expand...

If you don't mind removing your optical drive you could get a HDD caddy to replace it.
Depending on the caddy build material, you can use a 12.5mm 1.5GB HDD.

Never mind, saw you have an "ultraportable".
 
cyclone3d said:
HDDs as the main drive pretty much sucks in any computer now days.

Not only is is going to be slower, but your are going to take a hit on battery performance as well.

And let's talk about installing Windows updates. With a HDD, you are going to see a hit of at least 3-4x more time spent to install those updates when compared to an SSD.

Same goes for any software install/uninstall/update as well, especially when dealing with a lot of small files.
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Interesting, kinda what I was thinking as well. I'll probably just get a good external HDD. I have files on my SSD I'm storing for storage sake and it just filled up fast.


Aesma said:
2TB drives are not slim enough to go into laptops.
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Like I posted above I'll probably just go for an external HDD, a good 2TB.

ninjaturtle said:
If you don't mind removing your optical drive you could get a HDD caddy to replace it.
Depending on the caddy build material, you can use a 12.5mm 1.5GB HDD.

Never mind, saw you have an "ultraportable".
Click to expand...

Yeah, ultraportable...if I had an M-sata port in this laptop I'd definitely go that route but it doesn't have one.
 
I couldn't do it myself. Every time I'm on a system without a SSD I constantly feel I'm wasting time doing even inane tasks. Even little things, like the dictionary loading for spellchecking, cause tangible lag on a spinner now that I've been using SSDs for nearly two years now. When I put the 120 GB SSD in my laptop I thought it would cause me issues, but I've not really seen it yet. That's not to say my next one won't be larger, of course it will be, but using it and a small external 1TB drive works great.
 
blitzkommando said:
I couldn't do it myself. Every time I'm on a system without a SSD I constantly feel I'm wasting time doing even inane tasks. Even little things, like the dictionary loading for spellchecking, cause tangible lag on a spinner now that I've been using SSDs for nearly two years now. When I put the 120 GB SSD in my laptop I thought it would cause me issues, but I've not really seen it yet. That's not to say my next one won't be larger, of course it will be, but using it and a small external 1TB drive works great.
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What kind of external HDD do you use? I bought a USB powered Seagate drive about a year and half ago and the controller died.
 
I bought a USB powered Seagate drive about a year and half ago and the controller died.
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Remember that any drive you purchase will have an expected failure rate of over 1% each year of its 5 year expected lifetime.
 
i have a 240gb Intel and a 100gb Kingston V300 in my 2 notebooks and I just use 64gb SD cards and the super small 32gb flash drives that i keep in my USB ports at all times to increase storage when i need it,....

plus i own 2 external WDs a 500gb that is 4-5 years old and 1 TB that is less than a year old.

the days of using a HDD in a PC as the boot drive are over!

:D
 
I have a XT750 hybrid on my server since I wanted the computer to react quickly to network requests, but I also wanted to have storage for pictures.

The drive is not that much better then a standard platter drive. Things like Internet Explorer and iTunes pop up very fast as they are programs that always get ran. But any time you go to load some thing "new" it goes as fast as a platter drive. If you have the cash, then its a good compromise.

You have to consider that its just 1 8GB chip on it. So it not only isnt alot of storage, but 1 NAND chip by itself will have less performace than the platter, EXCEPT, when it comes to small random accesses. So it loads little files nice and quick, and hopefully those files will be related to Windows system files as well as apps that you run frequently. But if for some reason a larger file did get commited to the NAND it would be no faster in sequential reads than the platter. I don't think anyone outside of Seagate knows the logic that is used on the NAND. Remember that it is completely unaware of the operating system, there is no utility or driver used. So it can't prioritize files with the operating system.

Like I said if you have the money I would recommend it, but if 1TB of space looks more appealing for the price then go for that.
 
One other thing,

Is there a reason you are considering so much space for you laptop? Is this your main device? Are you using it for backup or movies/music?

My laptops are more for productivity/work or just casual usage (maybe a game or 2) so something like a 256GB drive would be plenty. Even on my main system I am plenty happy with a 256GB SSD. I have a 1TB drive that I use for scratch for encoding movies and stuff, but thats not stuff I would do on my laptop.
 
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