How much would you save?

DoubleTop_2

So here's one for the very technical and lovers of some nice math

What about matching up a laptop drive versus a desktop drive in specs and pricing? So I found two Western Digital drives and read up a few spec sheets and picked out the ones I feel are relevant.

Desktop			Laptop

Model Numer	WD2500AAJS		WD2500BEKT
Capacity	250GB			250GB
Interface	SATA-II			SATA-II
Rotation	7200rpm			7200rpm
Buffer/Cache	8MB			16MB
AverageSeek	8.9ms			12ms
operatingSound	25dBA			22dBA
Warranty	3year			5year

EnergyLoad	9.50W			2.50W
EnergyIdle	1.60W			0.85W (powersave)
 
Price       	 [URL="http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/SATA+%28Serial+ATA%29/Less+than+500GB/250GB+Western+Digital+WD2500AAJS+Caviar+Blue+3.5%22+SATA+II+Hard+Drive+?productId=28742"]£28.62[/URL]      	      [URL="http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Notebook+-+2.5%26quot%3B/SATA/250GB+Western+Digital+Scorpio+Black+2.5%22+Laptop+SATA+II+Hard+Drive+?productId=39951"]£33.90[/URL]

Now I ask the big question So we all know that there are very few machines that really use the massive storage capacity that has become a big numbers game for sales people to spout. I have lost count of the number of 1Tb+ machines I've had to service or do something with that have a OS install, office and some docs, using at most 20Gb. So my thoughts are running down this train line at the moment, why oh why are we not placing 2.5" drives into systems? 3.1ms? or is it the warranty, oh wait the 2.5" drive has a longer warranty. It must be power usage then, oh wait .....

So it pulls down to price and that magic sales of bigger is better, price per GB the desktop drives win hands down, but as a second drive to your SSD to install games on, 2.5" FTW

My next purchase, two of the 250Gb laptop drives to go into the kids machines for purpose outlined above. Low power, low heat, low noise 2 year extra warranty for £5.28, gets my vote, but am I right?

So now to the math, how much of a saving would this make in an average office of 252 working days(assumption), with an average of 9hours on per machine per day .... I saw Martin test the low power EEE-Box and some other machines of that standard a while ago on TV, so I've posted this question to a few places. I have great expectations of here giving me a proper MSE answer

DT.

Hammyman

DoubleTop wrote: »

So my thoughts are running down this train line at the moment, why oh why are we not placing 2.5" drives into systems? T.

Slower speeds. Even the one you quoted has a seek time of 50% more than the desktop and guess what your HDD spends a lot of its time doing? Most laptop hard drives are 5400RPM.

The 7200RPM laptop drives fail quicker and run hotter.

You'd save next to sod all. I doubt it'd be even measurable.

fwor

Agreed, the seek times are obviously worse, though I suspect that the heat problems with laptop drives are mainly due to the way that they have to be crammed into a small space with little ventilation.

I've used cheap laptop drives in two media centre PCs and it works well - to keep noise to a minimum I suspend the drives from nylon line (fishing line actually) in the middle of a 3.5" drive bay - they run cool and almost silent that way.

diable

You need to get out more DoubleTop ;o)))

banger9365

my system has a 120gb ssd with a partion off 100gb so the ssd can do its stuff and two 500gb f3 hdds in raid for games ,the hdds in raid are faster than the ssd but seek times are slow only on the hdds
and whs server for storage and back ups ,its got 6tb off space and its nearly full again and operating system for the whs is run off a 120gb laptop drive with 5200 rpm