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Product Survey: Internal Hard Drives
With capacities rising all the time, the cost of hard drive storage keeps on falling. Today, every gigabyte you buy costs only a matter of cents--but that doesn't mean that all of today's hard disk drives are a steal ...
Régis Jehl
Date: 2008-10-08
Date: 2008-10-08
Our Tests
Here's the configuration of our test system:
• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
• MSI P35 Diamond Motherboard
• 2 GB OCZ Platinum EB DDR3-1600 RAM
• Antec Sonata Designer Case
• 2x Western Digital Raptor 74 GB RAID 0
The RAID installation is there for the system disks to prevent those we're testing from becoming overloaded. Once the disk's in place, here's what we do:
• File Copying We use first large files, then small ones, and measure the average data speeds for reading from and writing to do the disk.
• Noise Management These tests are then repeated with the noise managed options described in the article activated to see if they have a detrimental impact on performance.
• Physical Measurements We measure noise levels with the disk active and idle, and do the same for its temperature using infrared thermometers placed on each side.
• Benchmarking Afterwards, we check all of these results using PC Mark Vantage and HDtach.
• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
• MSI P35 Diamond Motherboard
• 2 GB OCZ Platinum EB DDR3-1600 RAM
• Antec Sonata Designer Case
• 2x Western Digital Raptor 74 GB RAID 0
The RAID installation is there for the system disks to prevent those we're testing from becoming overloaded. Once the disk's in place, here's what we do:
• File Copying We use first large files, then small ones, and measure the average data speeds for reading from and writing to do the disk.
• Noise Management These tests are then repeated with the noise managed options described in the article activated to see if they have a detrimental impact on performance.
• Physical Measurements We measure noise levels with the disk active and idle, and do the same for its temperature using infrared thermometers placed on each side.
• Benchmarking Afterwards, we check all of these results using PC Mark Vantage and HDtach.
Some capacities are more common--and more popular--than others, but a decent retailer is likely to provide anything from 80 GB up to 1000 GB, or 1 TB.
But how much space do you really need? Are all of these gigabytes really necessary?
Let's look at what you might use them for:
- A regular movie occupies between 700 MB and 1.4 GB when compressed as a DivX file, with High Definition content producing bigger files. You can expect around 4.5 GB for a 720p movie, and 7.8 GB for 1080p. If you use your hard drive for nothing but movies then, you could easily cram around three hundred Standard Definition films onto a 500 GB drive.
- If you've got a lot of your own multimedia content--photos and videos, for instance--and here it often depends on the resolution that you're shooting in. Digital photos taken on an average 10 Megapixel compact take up around 5 or 6 MB each. If you go away for the weekend and take 200 snaps, that'll work out as around 1 GB. Videos you take using a camera can occupy anywhere from 600 MB to 1 GB for a ten-minute clip.
- For playing games, the latest 3D games can wipe out anywhere between 6 and 10 GB of your hard drive.
- If you're looking to archive your music collection, then an average MP3 will occupy between 5 and 10 MB, depending on how long it is and the quality you encode it at: better quality encodings require a bigger file. If you rip them at a reasonable quality, a thousand tracks will take up around 8 GB.
The amount of storage space on a drive isn't the only way of measuring its size, though, as hard drives come in a range of different physical sizes, too.
3.5'' is the most common category, and is used in desktop computers as well as enclosures for external hard drives, but laptops often feature 2.5'' disks.
Finally, mobile devices sometimes feature 1.8'' hard drives, but you're unlikely to encounter these as they're normally not replaceable by users.
Alphabet Soup
Once you've thought about how big you want your hard drive to be, you need to think about how you're going to connect it to the rest of your computer.
Internal hard drives usually connect directly to the motherboard inside your computer using one of two connectors.
Confusingly, however, they're known by a variety of abbreviations and acronyms.
The earlier of the two standards is ATA, which uses large 40-pin connectors and has a maximum cable length of around 18 inches, which was initially acceptable for use on the inside of a computer; it's also commonly known as IDE.
Subsequently, a refined version of this standard, known as Serial ATA, or SATA was developed, and is now increasingly common.
SATA presents a number of advantages over ATA, occasionally retroactively dubbed Parallel ATA, or PATA, to emphasize the development.
In particular, SATA permits more bandwidth, thinner cables that allow for better cooling and the technical ability to support 'hot-swapping' (changing cables without restarting your computer), although not all software supports this feature.
A third standard that you might come across is SCSI, but it's usually restricted to servers and other professional computing applications.
Noise Management
Amongst the major hard drive manufacturers, Samsung is the only one to not use Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) to attempt to try and reduce noise levels.
Often turned off by default, this feature allows you to reduce the amount of noise made by your hard drive as it reads data, sometimes at the cost of slower performance.
The very drives reach the same speeds whether AAM is turned on or not.
If you're interested in trying it, several software tools exist to modify the behavior of your drive, but one of the most is provided by Hitachi and is compatible with the majority of disks supporting AAM.
An alternative is the Notebook Hardware Control tool, designed to help you tweak the performance of your laptop to get the best battery life.
It works on regular desktop computers, though, and includes an option for setting AAM.
