Pimp my laptop

Non-3DO related chat here please.

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Jones
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Pimp my laptop

Post by Jones » Sun Aug 14, 2011 11:16 am

Hi guys,

I am planning to make my laptop a bit faster and decided to
buy a new HDD.

Has anyone any experiences with those flash memory hard discs?
How fast do they really are in comparison with a normal SATA hdd
(boot-up speed, data transfer rate,...)?

Also I've noticed now, that there are hdds with a spinning speed
of 7200 rpms - didn't know that before, I thought 5400 rpms was
the fastest for 2.5" discs.
How about heat issues with using 7200rpm hdds in a laptop?
Could imagine that such a hdd fries the hardware pretty much...!

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3DOKid
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Post by 3DOKid » Mon Aug 15, 2011 10:36 am

For the £ per Mb it's not really worth it in my opinion. I would rather have 500Gb HDD and wait an extra 5 seconds.

having said that booting is quite a bit quicker, but day to day access to the drive it's not massively noticeable to be honest. Plus the quality of SD HDD's is a fairly broad spectrum with only the best one being truly worth the expense.

Jones
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Post by Jones » Tue Aug 16, 2011 7:39 am

Thanks for the info! I guess I'll wait a bit before I get a flash hdd - letting
the technology improve a bit more.
*EDIT*: And let the prices drop a bit. :)

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Austin
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Post by Austin » Tue Aug 16, 2011 10:59 pm

I have heard that the flash drives also have a limited amount of writes? Is this true? I would be most worried about that.

Jones
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Post by Jones » Tue Aug 16, 2011 11:06 pm

Yes, that's true. But modern flash drives are "smart" and try to use all
areas of the memory equally when writing. This increases the live span
a lot. Strictly spoken, conventional hdds have a limited amount of writes, too.

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3DOKid
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Post by 3DOKid » Tue Aug 30, 2011 4:25 pm

So, I have been looking into this.

Seems the OCZ are quick for sequential loads. i.e. improves boot times but not so hot where there are lots of 4k read/writes. Also, the OCZ ones seem to have a lot of failures. Looking at their forums, there are a lot of unhappy customers.

Intel use a different controller chip and have fewer unhappy customer. It seems intel are a little slower on the sequential reads (so they boot a wee bit slower) but the 4k file is a lot better.

I'm toying with this or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10" :)

Although, I don't really need either. So, i'll probably get neither. (oh to be young again :) )

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Austin
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Post by Austin » Tue Aug 30, 2011 10:27 pm

Seems a little too flakey at the moment to be worth it.

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3DOKid
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Post by 3DOKid » Wed Aug 31, 2011 9:43 am

Too expensive too. £200+ for 120gb drive is a bit daft

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JohnnyDude
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Post by JohnnyDude » Fri Sep 02, 2011 5:51 am

Buzz!!!!

I'm just throwing my vote in that I love the SDD disk I got. Everything is legitimately faster. Also, there's no noise.

It's all about price though. I've seen cheap deals show up like $100 for 94Gb.

Hm, and I suppose if it were down to that or a sweet juicy tablet as a toy, I'd go with the galaxy tab, 3DOKid.

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3DOKid
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Post by 3DOKid » Fri Sep 02, 2011 8:23 am

I'm settling for a car service and some rear brakes.

:(

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Austin
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Post by Austin » Sat Sep 03, 2011 10:04 pm

D'oh! I suppose it had to be done though..

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