Choosing your hard drive

[alltp]

You might think that choosing the right hard drive is the easiest part of buying a tablet and you might be right. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't carefully weight your options. My experience is that someone's first reaction is "give me the biggest, fastest hard drive available." You can't go too far wrong with that strategy, but consider the points below.

To determine how much storage space (gigabytes or Gb) you require, take a look at the computer you are using now. If you've been using your PC for a while, go to My Computer, click once on the C: drive and see how much disk space you've used. My informal survey over the last few years is that a majority of people have used between 9 and 13Gb space. If you are in that category, why buy a 160Gb hard drive? Instead, use the money to upgrade the memory or buy an extra pen - both of which will likely provide you more benefits.

Besides hard drive size, speed is another consideration. Hard drives for tablets come in three speeds - 4200rpm, 5400rpm, and 7200rpm. The faster a hard drive has to "spin up" the more power it consumes. Although some data states that the power loss is negligible, my experience is that customers with 7200rpm vs. 5400rpm hard drive get about 15% less battery time. This is not scientific - just based on people that have had both drives in their tablets or own multiple tablets. Anyway, if available with your tablet, choose a 5400rpm hard drive or if you run a lot of demanding applications like video editing, compiling large spreadsheets or computer aided design get yourself a 7200rpm hard drive.

Solid state drives have begun to invade the turf of standard hard drives. They are much more expensive per Gb but have some advantages. With no moving parts, they are less susceptible to damage although with the automatic parking feature of hard drives that isn't such a big deal. The heat and power that SSDs consume is less and that is an advantage. Unless you have a specific need for a SSD (like a pilot who flies above 10,000 feet unpressurized) you should wait until the prices come down.

[negative1]

for some people, they may want a bigger hard drive.

i'm replacing some in the tablets i have, because for
some the price is not that much more for a larger drive.

also, i would like to have multiple os'es on each one,
just to be compatible with the types of programs i have..

i'm also experimenting with windows 7, because i don't want
it to be the main system..

windows xp tablet works pretty well across all tablets..

however i would like to have windows 2000/98/95/NT4 as backups..
which most people won't need... however, for the older and slower
systems, these will work much better than XP..

the other thing is, how much data do you need with you?
if you have a lot of multimedia files, its a lot easier copying them
to a bigger drive, and not having to worry about space...

on the older 10-20 gig drives, they can take up space quickly..

lastly you can check to see what drives/sizes are compatible to upgrade
to for your older systems, (most newer ones have a lot of options)..

later
-1

[calypsospots]

I agree with negative1. While those who don't use many GB don't need to spend the extra money on more space, a lot of people do need the most storage possible. I've got a 250 GB hard drive and it is relatively full, despite efforts to dump files onto external drives.

The system I was happiest with (on my previous tablet) was a dual hard drive setup. The main hard drive had all the programs plus a small number of data files. The swappable drive (I could put in the CD/DVD drive instead, but seldom needed to except to install programs or watch movies) had nearly all the data files. This made defragging the hard drives a real simple matter, among other benefits. I would really recommend that people who have a lot of image, music, or movie files, and who need to take those along with them, look for systems that provide this kind of dual-hard-drive setup.

[dirtyvu]

Whether you have an older tablet or a state-of-the-art tablet, an SSD is the best way to maximize the performance. It is the most tangible performance enhancement of any upgrade (outside of an upgrade to the graphics chipset which is nearly impossible for most notebooks). Far more than additional RAM, far more than overclocking the CPU, and far more than increasing the RPM of the hard drive.

While most of the parts in your PC (CPU, graphics, etc.) have been following Moore's Law and increasing performance dramatically, the speed of hard drives have been advancing at a glacial pace.

Your system boot time will be cut in half. For example, my fully loaded HP TX2000 used to take well over 2 minutes to finish booting Windows 7 with a hard drive (time from when you press the power button to when the last application is loaded). A fully loaded Windows 7 SSD setup takes just over 1 minute. Installation of applications is an order of magnitude faster. Programs launch much faster. All the hard drive thrashing that occurs when you are multitasking and copying files just disappears. All the hiccups when you are doing disk-intensive activities go away.

But besides the dramatic performance upgrade, an SSD doesn't have moving parts. You can flip your tablet all around without having to worry about a spinning hard drive with a needle.

So if you want to give legs to your beaten up old machine, an SSD could be the best way. But note that your notebook needs a SATA interface. And to prolong the life expectancy of the SSD (it is flash afterall), you need a BIOS that supports AHCI and an operating system that supports the TRIM command (currently only Windows 7 and Linux support it).

Also note that SSD cannot match the value aspect of a hard drive. I bought an 80GB Intel SSD for $180. So if you're expecting 250 or 500 GB or terabyte sizes in an SSD or a reasonable price, you'll have to wait quite a few more years in the hope that prices come down. So unless you have a lot of money to allocate, you'll have to learn to live with smaller sizes.