Notebooks and laptop PCs of late have become rivals to that of the desktop market. This holds true when you look at the specs of the new notebooks coming out. Processor power is hitting the 2.5 GHz mark, memory sizes are in excess of 1GB and mobile GPUs are comparable to that of the desktop as well. In fact, there are even some notebooks with SLI in them. With all these advancements there are still some parts lagging behind such as the audio side of things; and more importantly, storage solutions.
Laptops have one great disadvantage when it comes to the desktop segment, they are restricted in size. Who wants to lug around a heavy laptop computer? Not I. Processors are getting smaller in size, but frequencies go up, power requirements go down and heat dissipation gets better; this gives you more processing power at less voltage.
Memory modules are shrinking in physical size, but again the amount of memory per stick is increasing giving you even more power out of your PC. With the development of graphics technology getting better we start to see high-end graphics in tiny packages as well. The one thing that has its limitations is the storage.
Hard disks while getting larger in storage size can only go to a certain point with magnetic recording. You can only shrink the magnetic strips to a certain size before you start to encounter cohesion problems with the platters. Speed is another factor, in order for you to increase the rotation speed of a HDD you need to increase the voltage to the motors, which is another problem as laptops have limited battery life; the more speed the HDD has, the more voltage it will draw off the battery. More voltage also presents other problems such as heat. When you place more voltage into a device it’s traded off as heat. Again, laptops have limited space for cooling, so everything has to fit within a fine tolerance.
Today we are testing out one of the newest HDDs to come out for the laptop market, Western Digital’s Scorpio HDD with an amazing 250GB capacity, this being one of the largest 2.5” HDDs on the market.
