Introduction

Sales of netbooks, laptops and desktop replacements has been rising these last several years, in 2008 we even saw the scale tip over in favor of these portable computers. Most of these devices share the same processor, video card and chipset technology as their desktop counterparts, delivering performance almost on par. The overall speed of a PC is determined by its slowest component, inside laptops this has been the hard drive, due to space constraints manufacturers have to use 2.5” (and even 1.8”) sized drives, which reduces the storage space as well as speed compared the desktop 3.5” disks. With the introduction of the Solid State Drives in 2008, we should be able to overcome this bottleneck in our portable PCs, unfortunately pricing is still quite high and disk size is limited to a fraction of what the good old hard drives are capable of.

In this business world every penny saved is a penny won, so you won’t see any SSD in entry and mainstream laptops just yet, instead you do get larger drives which can store up 500Gb inside a 2.5” HDD housing, impressive to say the least.

We tested a business grade Dell Latitude D630 laptop with three different 2.5” hard drives to see how much it would benefit from a HDD upgrade. On the Dell site the default configuration costs $1243, it comes with an 80Gb 5400rpm 2.5” HDD. Dell gives you the option to upgrade to a 7200rpm model for $40 which is definitely worth it. You can also go for an SSD, but the cheapest will set you back $450 and it’s only 34Gb… not really a good deal. They also have a “128Gb Mobility Solid State Drive“ listed for $460, which can be any MLC based SSD.

The 7200rpm 80Gb 2.5” disk we found inside our D630 was a Seagate Momentus 7200.2 80gb. Dell does change brand and model over the course of a year, so it’s a not 100% certain you’ll find this disk in every D630 ordered with a 80gb 7200rpm HDD.

Specifications
The Seagate Momentus 7200.2 SATA/300 80 GB laptop hard drive enables the best combination of high performance, capacity and mobility in a 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF). The Seagate Momentus 7200-RPM-class hard drive is ideal for performance-class laptops, SFF PCs and many other small or mobile performance environments.

8-MB cache

SATA 3.0Gb/s interface

Highest available laptop hard drive performance for maximum productivity

Superb reliability

Rugged mobility

Whisper-quiet operation

Low power consumption

We wanted a lot more storage on this laptop than was offered by the 80Gb Seagate, Dell only offers upgrades up to 160Gb so we had to look elsewhere. In a local shop we picked up two 2.5” drives from Western Digital, one Scorpio 250Gb and one Scorpio Black 320Gb

Specifications Scorpio Black
With 7200 RPM spin speed, 16 MB cache, and capacities up to 320 GB, these drives enable you to have the best of both worlds: the capacity and performance of a desktop PC with the convenience and portability of a notebook.

Specifications Scorpio
With 5400 RPM spin speed and 12 ms access time and up to 3 Gb/s SATA interface speed, even the most demanding customer will appreciate the performance achieved by WD Scorpio Blue drives.

The Scorpio Black is top of the line performance drive, 7200rpm and 16Mb cache, it matches and surpasses the specifications of many desktop hard drives. The Scorpio (none-black) spins at 5400rpm which is considerably slower so it’ll be interesting to see how it stacks up to the competition.

We paid the Scorpio Black 320Gb €131, the normal Scorpio 250Gb only €70. Let’s do some benchmarking ->

Vista Sysprep

We used Windows Vista as our operating system for these benchmarks; after a clean install we ran Microsoft’s System Preparation Utility which resets the user defined options of the OS, leaving a clean copy ready for deployment. We took an image of this Vista Sysprep and dumped it on our three test drives. During the initial bootup of Vista it will go through the setup process, detecting hardware and so on… we preconfigured the PC name and other settings in a special .ini file, so the installation is completely unattended. We measured the time it took from first boot with the Vista Sysprep, until the system was ready and desktop loaded.

The time mentioned in the chart below is in minutes:seconds:



With the Seagate drive installation took almost 11 minutes, with the WD Scorpio the total time doesn’t differ much, despite its 5400rpm. The Scorpio Black does it one minute faster, which is quite impressive and noticeable in this test.

Vista System Score

Next up we launched Vista’s integrated system rating benchmark which does a quick check to see how your computer rates. The HDD scores were:



This does mimic the Sysprep test, so this tool gives you a real-world indicator of the performance difference.

PCMark Vantage

Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage include 6 different HDD tests, ranging from application loading times, to Vista bootup time, as well as import, video editing etc. Here are the results:



Application loading times was the only test where there hardly any impact from the HDD upgrade, all the other tests show a very noticeable difference when you swap the Seagate with a WD Scorpio Black. The 250Gb Scorpio 5400rpm switches places with the Seagate drive depending on the test.

Let’s delve deeper into the benchmarks with a series of synthetic tests ->

HD Tach 3.0

We start off with HD Tach 3.0 (which needs to be run in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode under Vista to work).

The access times are directly related to the platter spin speed as well as the cache size:



The Seagate drive boasts the lowest access time, while the 5400rpm Scorpio is the slowest, overall though the difference is quite small between these drives. Do note that desktop counterparts usually score sub 14ms while the Western Digital 10.000rpm scores even sub 10ms.

Sustained read speeds are up next:



Here we see that a ~35% increase in raw read speed (Seagate -> WD Scorpio Black) doesn’t necessarily translate into the same speed boost overall. The 5400rpm Scorpio does quite well here, beating the Seagate despite its lower RPM.

ATTO HDD Benchmark

The ATTO HDD benchmark differentiates itself from HDTach by its separation of results by file chunk size; the smaller the files (and file chunks) the lower the performance of a drive.



The Seagate drive tops out at ~50mb/s in the read speed test, the Scorpio 5400rpm does better , up to 63mb/s, the Scorpio Black with its 16Mb cache shows an earlier boost, all the way up to ~71Mb/s.



The write speed test came out surprisingly similar to the read speed, but there are dips in speed here and there depending on the file chunk size used.

Conclusive Thoughts

If you’re using a laptop and have no real limit budget wise, you can go all out and get yourself an Intel X25-M or X25-E Solid State Drive and enjoy 170mb/s write speeds with no defragmentation and 0ms access times.

If however you are more budget wise and want more than a few gigabytes of hard disk space in your laptop you’ll have to look either to entry level SSD which can go up to 128Gb, with pricing still quite high, or go for a high end 2.5” HDD which will have a lot more storage space, but higher access times. This last one we tested today, the Western Digital Scorpio Black is available up to 320Gb and with its 16Mb onboard cache does deliver quite a boost over the default laptop hard drives large OEMs like Dell include with their products.


Funny enough, the Seagate and WD Scorpio score on average the same! The Scorpio Black is a good 35% faster.

If you’re only interested in extra storage, things get a lot more budget friendly, the normal Scorpio from Western Digital costs about half of the Black version, despite its 5400rpm it does keep up with the reference Seagate 2.5” 7200rpm drive we compared it too, quite an impressive feat.

We hope to do a follow-up article in the very near future with some affordable SSD thrown into the mix, to see how things scale from there. Thank you for reading.