Any news on Laptop drives?

[gentrinity]

All I have read is that Fujitsu is coming out with a 170GB drive soon. Is there anything else anyone is planning on releasing soon? Anything bigger, badder, and faster?

 

[SuperFly03]

I doubt it will be a 170GB hard drive, the most I have seen is 160GB (2 80GB platters I believe). 170 is an odd number.

The best hard drives are 7200RPM 100GB models (like I have 8O )

There are larger ones, but they run 5400RPM's and that is devastating if you are looking for desktop like access times/STR. 5400 RPM will net you about 20min in battery life though.

 

[gentrinity]

The form factor im getting will have two Travelstar 100GB 7200RPMs in RAID 0 and a 160GB 5400RPM drive for storage. Sucker can hold 3 HDs which is a great convinience.

I have heard that Hitachi was going to make some 200GB hard drives, but I have not seen anything in writing.

 

[SuperFly03]

The form factor im getting will have two Travelstar 100GB 7200RPMs in RAID 0 and a 160GB 5400RPM drive for storage. Sucker can hold 3 HDs which is a great convinience.

I have heard that Hitachi was going to make some 200GB hard drives, but I have not seen anything in writing.

That is one big ass notebook. Mine can hold 2 hard drives, which is common in the 17" models. You must be getting a 19 or 20" one 8O

Laptop hard drives make a stealthy launch because they are mainly sold through OEM's and not traditional retail channels like desktop drives, so you could very well be right.

 

[gentrinity]

Its a 17inch one. Thats the amazing thing. i am as stumped as you are. On one form factor, the only possible way I can have 2 HDs is by taking away the optical. On this system, not only does it allow for 3 HDs and the optical drive, but also has SLI capabilities, all while having a C2D processor. And not the laptop version "Merom", the Conroe version with the FSB of 1066. Its an amazing beast. Only reason im waiting is cause I dont want to make such a large purchase for a 7950 GTX, rather wait for the laptop DX10 cards before I make such an investment.

 

[SuperFly03]

Ok, my guess is that it is a 20" frame with a 17" screen. This provides the overall volume necessary for 3 hard drives and an optical drive and yet gives you your 17" screen. This is just a guess of course since I have no idea which actual model you are talking about.

Laptop DX10 cards are due out this summer as far as I know, think july time frame. I definitely wouldn't shell out for a 7950 either, not worth it at this point. I shelled out for a 7600 which is a upper performance mainstream card since this laptop is a secondary computer, not a primary gaming machine.

I wonder about the choice of a Conroe over Merom for CPU mainly because the TDP for a Conroe is double that of a Merom, but the performance isn't double. It's your call and obviously the OEM has accounted for the increased heat production, we hope lol.

Also, if you wait till July we should have more info on the availability of hybrid drives which should be really exciting.

 

[gentrinity]

Well, lets see what the frame is going to be then cause the pics dont seem as such.

This form factor is being released by two companies as far as I know.

HyperSonic
Sager

I sure hope to god you are wrong about the DX10 cards coming in July. I really hope that by late May they can arrive. Oh to dream.

The company im going to buy from is Hypersonic because they have an accidental coverage protection which I believe is important if im going to buy a $3000 laptop. Big problem is that I cannot downgrade my 7950GTX. I will talk to them and see if its possible, but I wont get my hopes up. This is going to be a bit of a problem.

Can you explain what TDP means?

Since im getting a E6600, then it is faster than any Merom on the market, and I do plan on OCing since the memory getting installed will be DDR2-667. What do you think will be the frequency if I get the 1:1 FSB and memory? 2.8GHz? 3.0GHz?

Can you elaborate a bit more on hybrid drives?

 

[SuperFly03]

Can you explain what TDP means?

Since im getting a E6600, then it is faster than any Merom on the market, and I do plan on OCing since the memory getting installed will be DDR2-667. What do you think will be the frequency if I get the 1:1 FSB and memory? 2.8GHz? 3.0GHz?

Can you elaborate a bit more on hybrid drives?

TDP is thermal design power

The Thermal Design Power (TDP) (sometimes called Thermal Design Point) represents the maximum amount of power the thermal solution in a computer system is required to dissipate. For example, a laptop's CPU cooling solution may be designed for a 20 W TDP, which means that it can dissipate (either via an active cooling method such as a fan, a passive cooling method via natural convection, via heat radiation or all three modes of heat transfer) 20 watts of heat without exceeding the maximum junction temperature for the chip. The TDP is typically set not to be the most power the chip could ever draw (such as by a power virus), but rather the maximum power that it would draw when running real applications. This ensures the system will be able to handle all applications without exceeding its thermal envelope, without requiring a cooling solution for the maximum theoretical power, which would cost more and achieve no real benefit.

basically how much heat it is designed to output and designed to cope with.

Ocing--

On laptop that is a bad idea, very bad generally. Laptop have strict thermal tolerances and are usually designed to barely meet thermal dissipation requirements so OC'ing is generally not a good idea. Also, the laptop BIOS usually don't allow access to the options to overclock and clockgen doesn't work usally on a laptop because of the proprietary nature of the motherboard.

Hybrid Hard drive

It is a simple concept thankfully. Take 1GB of non volatile flash ram and pair that with a hard drive all in one package and that is a hybrid drive. This allows you to do a few things:

1) The system and write/read from the flash portion for a majority of tasks (word/excel/web/etc.) and never have to spin the hard drive which reduces power consumption

2) Sleep/Hibernate will resume much faster than a typical hard drive

3) Boot times should be faster since some system data should be on the flash portion buffer and flash is much faster access time wise when compared with mechanical hard drives.

 

[gentrinity]

You make an excellent point about the probable lack of OCing, however I do point out that Alienware offers a 2.66GHz OCed laptop, so it might be possible, obviously, it remains to be seen if such thing could be done with a Hypersonic. Also, I work at a server room, so the temperatures in there should help a bit. Its a wait and see kinda thing.

Yeah, those hybrid drives sound very very interesting. Do you have any idea how it will handle the sorting? Will you be able to choose where you want to put in what. Cause it would be ideal to store the OS, Photoshop and a game or two on the Flash memory. That would be insane boot times.

 

[SuperFly03]

You won't be able to choose where to put the file, it is OS managed and restricted to use in Vista i think. Vista is supposed to manage the flash portion based on your usage patterns and keep the most frequently accessed files in the flash portion so the hard drive spins up as little as possible. So there is very little, if any, end user control over the flash portion.

You can OC the laptop if you want, I just wanted you to be aware that they typically operate on very strict tolerances.