Laptop Hard Drives

The hard drive is a very important part of a laptop as it lets you store all of your work and information that is on the laptop. The size of the hard drive is what enables you to store everything you have and save it. When your hard drive is full, your laptop will run slowly and you will not be able to save anything else. So in a way you could say that the hard drive is one of the most important parts in a laptop - the same as a desktop computer, hard drives are like the laptop's brain with all the information it stores.

When searching for new laptop hard drives online, there are many different ones to choose from. Different specifications as well as different brands so it is up to you to determine what specs you want the hard drive to have and also who you want it to be made by. Laptop hard drives are also available in different sizes, physically, as well as internally.

When looking through laptop hard drives to purchase one, look for one that is slightly bigger than you need it to be, for example, if you think you only need an 80 gig hard drive, rather go for a 100 gig one. It is not really that much difference but it is not healthy for your laptop if your hard drive is too slow.

Make sure you know what you are buying when you do your shopping. You have to know a bit about what you are doing because you need to make sure the hard drive will be compatible with your laptop and everything will run smoothly.

Laptop Solid State Drives

Solid state is an electrical term that refers to electronic circuitry that is built entirely out of semiconductors. The term was originally used to define those electronics such as a transistor radio that used semiconductors rather than vacuum tubes in its construction. Most all electronics that we have today are built around semiconductors and chips. In terms of a SSD, it refers to the fact that the primary storage medium is through semiconductors rather than a magnetic media such as a hard drive.

How Do They Work?

Traditional HDD have a spinning platter with a head that reads data from the platter. Remember all those hard drive crashes? This was primarily due to the vulnerability of the head being jarred by dropping or bumping into the computer and crashing into the platter causing mechanical and or read/write errors. Solid State Drives have no moving parts. Instead they have Nand flash chips and a controller.

Increased Performance?

SSDs are noted for faster startups and shutdowns. They also have improved performance when applications are launched. Traditional hard drives get fragmented and slower over time unlike Solid State Drives. Because of this non fragmentation SSDs have a real time improvement with random reads. Performance remains constant throughout the entire drive even when it starts to fill up.

SSD vs Battery Life?

Many components in a notebook computer effect battery life. LCD Screens in particular do. The savings are about 10% prolonged laptop battery life for An SSD vs a traditional hard drive. For most, an SSD upgrade is not worth it for this feature alone.

Which laptop brands have SSD options?

Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Apple, Dell, Sony, and HP/Compaq are amongst the brands offering SSDs now. Solid State Drives are available in 64, 128, and 256 GB models.