What's the cheapest and most reliable internal hard drive for laptops?

Question

What's the cheapest and most reliable internal hard drive for laptops?

Answer 1

Do you want the cheapest or the most reliable. You can't have both.

Answer 2

Let's decompose the question into two parts: finding a reliable internal drive for a notebook computer, and then, finding the cheapest one. I'll include two other important metrics: capacity and performance.



Hard data about hard drive reliability is hard to come by. A well known survey done by google over hard drives used in their datacenters turned out strikingly different results for different makes and models -- among other factors. Storagereview.com gathers reliability data, but have not released their results yet. The best I'm aware of is the "leader board" at storage review, which I can only assume is informed by the reliability datapoints they collected. As I write this, the leaderboard drive featured for the 2.5" notebook drive category is the Hitachi Travelstar 7K200, which is available at several capacities, from 80GB to 200GB.



If performance is of interest to you, you should look at tom's hardware benchmark of notebook drives. The said Hitachi drive features as number 9 out of about 60, with a throughput of 53 MB/s. Compare that to the top performer, Seagate Momentus 7200.3 at 69.7 MB/s. Most of the drives in the list rate at under 40MB/s.



Finally, to review capacity and identify the cheapest drives, look at the factblender.com hard drive chart. The drive lets you compare drive prices vs. their capacity. First, filter it to show just notebook drives. I can see the 80GB version of the 7K200 at $39.99 at newegg.com, the 100GB version at $49.99, and the 200GB one at $75.99 from Dell.



Finally, one word of advice -- all hard drives have a finite lifetime, even the best of them. As they have moving parts, they are the first component to experience malfunctions in a computer. Particularly in a laptop which gets carried around and perhaps occasionally dropped, the failure is guarantied to strike. Always keep a backup of your data... One school of thought suggests buying the cheapest drive available, and ensuring you have extra copies of everything somewhere safe.

Answer 3

Western Digital

Answer 4

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