Click Tips: Laptop hard disks

By Rob Freeman Click tip-ster

Rob Freeman, Click's very own Mr Fixit, troubleshoots your PC problems and helps you get the most out of your computer. This week he looks at laptop hard disks.

One complaint about old laptops is the size of their hard disks which is the subject of today's lecture.

Now until recently, they came with fairly small ones.

If you were to buy a laptop three or four years ago, you would get a hard disk that was maybe 30 or 40 GB and had a speed of 5000 rpm.

Nowadays we have got a choice. I have a new one which contains 160 GB, about the same size as you would get in a standard desktop, and have a Sata connector which has the same connector for the laptop hard disk as for the big desktop hard disk which means you can interchange the two if you ever have a problem.

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There is also another kind of disk - a solid state disk - which is less than half the weight of the previous one.

There are no moving parts in this disk. Why is that a good thing? Because it is an awful lot more robust.

No moving parts should also mean that it will last a lot longer but there are downsides as well. It is a lot more expensive and the capacity is a great deal less.

Upgrading

It is really simple. Every laptop hard disk has a standard size disk which means you can buy one off the shelf. Just make sure it has the right pins, for example Sata. Then all you have to do is pop it into your laptop.

Now once you have installed a new hard disk, you are going to need to put an operating system onto it. Let us say Windows, for the sake of argument.

If you have lost your old Windows CD, you will actually need a new one, because you cannot copy over the Windows installation that was on the previous hard disk.

Start-up

Now one of the big deals with these drives is their speed. So we took a very generous yard stick to test just how much faster - if at all - these drives went. We timed their boot-up speed from the time the manufacturer's logo appeared on the screen to when the cursor stopped displaying the waiting logo on all three drives: the slower one, the faster one and the solid state version.

The same version of Windows Vista was clean installed on all drives with the same drivers loaded as we used the same PC each time. And we switched off the Windows sidebar so we could see the results faster. The only difference was for the solid state drive - so we could tell which one it was - we left the XPS logo up on the screen.

Not a particularly scientific experiment but it did show there was a difference, but not a big difference. The slower 5000 rpm drive took 38 seconds to load, the faster 7000 rpm drive took 35 seconds and the solid state disk took 31 seconds.

So there you have it, that is how to get a bigger disk. But if you already have quite a chunky disk, are you really prepared to go to all that fuss for not very much performance gain?

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