Intro to Laptop Hard Drives

Question

I've had my first notebook hard drive death (well, actually, it's currently dying... clicking noises, super slow windows boot up ...)

Anyway, I now I realize I don't know anything about laptop hard drives. I was just going to take one out of another laptop and stick it in but the connectors are the same.

How do you shop for laptop hard drives?

Answer 1

Interface (connectors):

• Parallel ATA a.k.a. IDE, ATA, ATAPI, UDMA and PATA — legacy, wide 40-pin connector for disks produced few years ago. In case of notebook drives pins are smaller, and there is also power supply in the same plug.
  

• Serial ATA (SATA) — modern connector. Most modern laptops use it. 6 data pins and 15 pins including power supply.

Sizes of laptop disks:

• 2.5" — most common
• 1.8" — reduced, used mostly in ultralights and netbooks.

Rotation speed:

• 7200RPM — modern, high-end 2.5" disks. Consume more energy.
• 5400RPM — standard, low-end 2.5"disks or high-end 1.8"disks. More energy-efficient.
• 4200RPM — legacy, low-end 2.5" disks, some modern reduced height and energy-efficient 2,5" or standard 1.8"disks.

Take in account, that 5400RPM HDD with bigger capacity actually might be faster, then smaller capacity 7200RPM.

HDD vs. SSD:

Modern alternative to SATA HDDs are Solid State Drives, based on flash memory. They have almost instantaneous seek times, incredible read speeds and very low power consumption. Yet they are very expensive and have a lot less capacity. There was related discussion on SF: http://serverfault.com/questions/2425/are-ssds-worth-the-money. Also, the reliability of SSDs have also been questioned: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

Answer 2

You asked how to shop for notebook hard drives. I prefer to hit my favorite review sites and look in their storage review sections. One of these always seems to have a good comparison review between hard drive vendors:

• TomsHardware storage section - most recent comparison is the 2.5" comparison charts. These are way too detailed, though.
• Anandtech storage section - good for SSD reviews

The one thing to be aware of is that there's some high-capacity drives that are taller than other drives. Your laptop may only tolerate a 9.5mm high drive, for example - so don't go buying a 12mm high drive unless you know it'll fit.

Answer 3

There are, really, only two types of drive connections: Regular old IDE (PATA) and SATA. Each use their own connector, and more importantly data transport protocol. So you have to buy the correct interface for your laptop. That being said most laptops will have another, specialized, connector that actually hooks the drive into the controller. As a result it can, on first blush, be non-obvious whether you are working with a SATA or PATA drive. That connector, however, should come off the old drive easily. Once you've figured out whether you need IDE or SATA look for 4 things. Size, Speed (rotational and seek time), Cache, and Warranty. First, figure out the size that you want, then try to maximize the rest based on the price you're willing to spend.

Answer 4

After installing a new ATA hard drive, don't use more space than is recognized by the BIOS. Otherwise there will be an addressing overflow and data will be written at the beginning of the drive and trash the boot sector. (Learned the hard way).