Hybrid or Perpendicular hard? Whats better over all.

Here are the two LAPTOP HD's I'm looking at becasue they are FREE from Dell, and a 250GB western digital is also an option. What would be best?

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/prod...1&sku=A0743227 Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB : Perpendicular

or

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/prod...1&sku=341-4900 Dell 120 GB 5400 RPM SATA Internal Hybrid

 

I don't know about the perpendicular device, but from what I've read, hybrid harddrives don't really give a significant performance boost over "normal" drives. But since you can get one for free, you might as well give it a shot. If anything it shouldn't be WORSE than a typical harddrive.

 

Higher density platters often result in higher performance as the R/W heads have shorter distances to travel in order to retrieve data. Based on Commander's claim that hybrids aren't much better than PATAs, I would say that the 160GB model is a better choice; more space with little or no drop in performance.

 

Links did not work for me. Aren't all HDD perpendicular now? I would comment more if the links worked and off the top of my head knew what hybrid meant. My gut is go perpendicular hybrid is a sales pitch.

 

That's what I was thinking but I wasn't totally sure.

This is where I got my info concerning hybrid drives:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/13/should_you_care_about_hybrid_hard_drives/

 

Well I can get a 250GB western Digital, I think its Perpendicular-hence 250Gb sata mobile, must be I'm thinking-. But wanted to get away from WD but a free 250GB I might have to go back to the darkside.

I havn't seen to much on Hyrid drives being perpendicular.

Found this info on Perpendicular http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/resear...Animation.html

 

Not all HDD's are perpendicular. But you can pretty much ignore it as a meaningless buzzword. It simply means that the manufacturer can create larger harddrives. So as a user, it makes no difference, it just means the disk will probably be bigger (in this case 160GB). So look at the size, and ignore the "perpendicular" crap.

Hybrid means it includes a small amount of flash RAM to act as a cache and speed things up. I haven't seen any benchmarks on the effectiveness of this, but unlike perpendicular, it may actually make a difference.

 

Um, no. But thanks for playing, please try again!

Perpendicular does indeed have a performance difference. It allows for higher data density, which does increase potential drive capacity, but more importantly, it boosts performance at the same rpm over a non-perpendicular drive.

Since the data is more dense, one revolution of the platter allows more bits to be read, thus delivering noticeably higher throughput.

A hybrid drive OTOH, is just a USB-style flash drive tacked onto a normal HDD. It's a gimick. It doesn't deliver any real world performance benefit. Internet benchmarks will show this, just do a google. You're still limited by how fast you can get bits to and from the platters. Slapping a bit 'o flash in between doesn't change that.

In high-throughput sequential I/O situations (like moving an ISO image file, for example), you're still limited by how fast the drive can read/write the platters, the flash memory doesn't help you any at all.

In low-throughput random I/O situations (office tasks, web browsing, gameing) that flash memory is again useless since the random nature of the I/O cannot be predicted with a look-ahead algorithm, and the reads cannot be pre-staged into flash.

Hybrid drives are just a gimicky buzzword that costs more $$ and doesn't deliver.

 

I was to lazy to look for Hyrid benchies cause they were harder to find(good ones anyway).

No Hyrid HD's for me then.

And I may get the 250Gb WD just becasue of space but if I could get a 250 Seagate I would!

Good info guys, Thanks

 

Presently, the only 250 GB 2.5" drives are the Western Digital WD2500BEV, the Samsung SpinPoint 250, and the Hitachi 5k250.

All are 5400 RPM with 8 MB cache. All but the WD are SATA-only. I can't tell you what other differences between them are. I favor the Hitachi brand, but that's just me.

You might want to check the specs on each of them to compare how much power they consume. A drive that uses 800 mW is going to get much hotter than a drive that uses 600 mW....

 

Same as any other technology that increases density. In other words, a 160GB harddrive (assuming same number of platters) will perform the same with or without perpendicular.

But perhaps you were too busy thinking up ways to insult me, to actually think about what I said?
Yes, a perpendicular harddrive can reach higher data density, and higher data density helps performance. But in that case, all you need to look at is the disk's capacity. A 160GB disk has higher density than a 120GB disk. Perpendicular or not.

In the same way that the CPU cache makes no performance difference?
Thank you for playing. Please try again.

Of course it can't boost performance in all cases, but with frequently used data, I don't see why not.

Sure it can. Ever heard of locality? Many applications keep reading/writing the same small number of files. So if those get cached in the HD's flash memory, presto, lower latency.

Of course, you might argue that it doesn't *often* provide a *noticeable* performance difference, and as I said, I haven't looked up benchmarks for it. But unlike perpendicular, hybrid actually has a performance impact in and of itself.

However, I didn't say "pick Hybrid over perpendicular". I said "Ignore perpendicular, and look at the drive's capacity instead".

Indeed. Thank you for playing. Please try again. And next time... please leave the attitude at the door.
If you're going to try to insult people, at least read their posts first.

 

Pretty much all new harddrives are perpendicular these days. Hybrids have yet to show significant performance differences. In large numbers of reads or small number of lots of reads, yes there is a performance gain. In high number of small writes and large sequential writes, no there is no performance gains or in some cases loss of performance. There is a benchmark here

What slows down hybrid drives is the random writes that occur in everyday use. In order to write to a cluster in flash memory, you have to completely erase it, and then rewrite it. Before that, you have to translate the write operation to something the flash memory can understand and vice versa for when you have reads

 

Couldn't be further from the truth. Not to insult, but I don't think you understand how a hard drive works internally.

A 160 GB hard drive that has two platters and two heads will NOT perform the same as a 160 GB hard drive that has two platters and four heads. Platter count is not the only variable that affects performance. Search the net for some 2.5" disk drive benchmarks. You'll find some wildly different performance numbers amongst drives of the same capacity and platter count.

The reason perpendicular recording IS a significant performance booster is that not only does it provide a significant increase in aerial density (improving performance), but also we are now reading the narrower 'Y' axis of each bit instead of the longer 'X' axis, so seek times (for certain kinds of seeks) are also improved.

To dismiss perpendicular recording altogether and tell someone who is hard drive shopping to "ignore it" is misleading and wrong.

As for hybrid drives, locality is something that any good database administrator is well aware of. Most databases have "hot spots" where the same small segments of data are hit over and over. But that's a database. A desktop PC has little to no locality of data access, so it's a useless feature IMO.

Further, hybrid drives use write-through caching. Not write-back. So even if the desktop user kept reading/writing the same small spot of data, all those writes go all the way through to the platters every time before acknowledging back to the OS that the write is complete. It's not at all like a CPU cache (which is write-back BTW), and provides no tangible benefit to the user.

 

I saw that the WD Bevs's use more power then the Seagate 160GB and some others. Thats one of the reasons I don't want a WD. But the extra space again.

 

Before this argument continues I'll state right now it will be closed down unless a peaceful conclusion can be reached. lumpin..the..3rd and Jalf I'm talking to.

Regarding the hard drives, I'd recommend the Western Digital. They are the best drives on the market in my opinion - more heavily built and quieter. They're simply a better quality drive. I am not sure if the 250GB drive you are looking at has Intelliseek technology, but what that does is reduce the rotational speed dynamically to reduce power. It won't reduce performance because the drive will only do that when throughput won't be reduced.

 

hard drive chart, very good info everyone should have!!!
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html

 

Just to restate. Perpendicular technology is a great improvement in HDD performance that in fact allows 5400rpm HDD's to hang and sometimes beat 7200rpm HDD's that do not have it. I also will say short of re researching, all current Seagate, Hitachi and WD use. I am shocked to read "it does not matter" it does. Anyone unfamiliar with HDD's please remember or at least consider that perpendicular technology is a great improvement and worth buying. It does allow the larger capacity HDD's but also gives increase performance. It would be nice to get a consensus on this for those new to computers because I doubt much room for debate on the performance aspect.