Hard Drives

[tenuulch]

Will Xotic be adding further hard drive options anytime soon (i.e. 5973 model)? They have the 320GB 7200rpm coming out in June. Worst case, how relatively easy is it to swap in a HD ourselves (and does it void warranty?)?

I assume most people concerned with speed/gaming use the 7200rpm? I suppose there is a decent speed difference b/t 5400 and 7200.

[Justin_W@XoticPC]

As new hard drives are released we may add them to our configuration menu depending on there compatibility with the laptops. Swapping out a hard drive is very simple and does not void your warranty.

There is a big speed/performance difference between a 5400 and 7200 RPM hard drive.

[tenuulch]

How about solid state drives, will Xotic offer those anytime soon? I know powertnotebooks.com and some other sites do offer solid state.

Do SSDs offer increased gaming performance as well? I heard they offer overall performance increase but for some reason not as well with games?

[Prasad007]

Yeah... it won't matter much in gaming. GPU affects gaming performance the most! CPU and RAM are also responsible for the performance in games. The faster speeds of SSDs will only help in file operations such as moving, copying files, etc. And games are negligibly affected by it, if at all.

[robamb2002]

SSD is more reliable and also reduce power consumption and increase batterylife... and cost a buttload more! :wink:

performance wise its benifits are marginal at best

[kpauls]

SSD is more reliable and also reduce power consumption and increase batterylife... and cost a buttload more! :wink:

performance wise its benifits are marginal at best

my friends I need to tell you about this site, dedicated to SSD benchmarking, testing, and reliability analysis

http://www.dvnation.com/

Check out the MTRON SSD disks they have available.


This will be my next upgrade.

[RaderCad]

Personally until the price of these come down, or the new nanostring technology drives come out, I would rather up grade to SLI with a second 8800.

[bargegod]

solid state drives in my opinion are good for 2 things....SPEEDY SPEED SPEEDY bootup/and shutdown, and longivity, meaning they will outlive ANY regular hdd. they have ZERO moving parts. kinda like ram. with no moving parts there really isnt anything to wear out. i wanted one for my vista ultimate. that was the only thing i was gonna load on it but it wasnt available through here. xtremenotebooks.com offers it but i cannot wouch for their workmanship or excellent customer care like u will find here at xoticpc. good luck! laters.....

[kpauls]

solid state drives in my opinion are good for 2 things....SPEEDY SPEED SPEEDY bootup/and shutdown, and longivity

There's still some debate about how compact-flash based memory compares in its longevity to mechanical drives.

The current state of the art is to use wear leveling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling) to extend the number of writes that occur before sectors become unreliable. This means that when you change a single byte on a SSD or flash device that entire page is rewritten at another location. Good thing there is no seek-time penalty for SSD's. ;) (also don't ever manually defrag a SSD, it's almost a complete waste of time and it shortens your drive's lifespan)

It's a good technique and it supposedly achieves several orders of magnitude of longevity over a flash drive without it, but SSD's don't naturally have a longer life than mechanical drives. They do have much better durability, extremely fast seek times, extremely low power requirements, and the highest quality SSDs have similar throughput performance to mechanical disks (early SSDs and cheaper SSDs do not have better throughput).

[clintre]

I have an SSD in my work laptop that I currently use. It is great for booting into windows. After that there is really not much gain as far as speed. Your reads area bit faster, but the writes are really marginal.

The only benefit I have truly seen is the battery lasting a good hour longer than with the hard drive that was in there before.

They are not really ready for prime time yet and may never be.

[bargegod]

well u COULD be correct on ur analysis of longivity, but SSD's unarguably have NO moving parts to wear out. that was the point i made. ;)

[Reinman]

Will Xotic be adding further hard drive options anytime soon (i.e. 5973 model)? They have the 320GB 7200rpm coming out in June. Worst case, how relatively easy is it to swap in a HD ourselves (and does it void warranty?)?

I assume most people concerned with speed/gaming use the 7200rpm? I suppose there is a decent speed difference b/t 5400 and 7200.

Of course, at the same time they may release a 500 Gb 5400 RPM. So again there will be no real point to buy the 7200 RPM at that price point.

[kpauls]

well u COULD be correct on ur analysis of longivity, but SSD's unarguably have NO moving parts to wear out. that was the point i made. ;)

yes definitely agreed!

from that perspective their "lifetime with wear & tear" is much superior

also 2009 may be the one for SSD upgrades! And if MLC SSD's take off we'll have to start worrying about 3Gbit SATA.

[bargegod]

that would be something. it'll happen. technology never goes to sleep. lol