Are all Laptops Pig Slow or what?

[Butcher]

You mean the platters.
As for that being bad, not always. Many high performance drives (10k and 15k rpm) have small platters because they are much more stable at high speeds. Also small platters give much better seek performance. You lose a bit of sequential speed (the desktop drives make it up by spinning faster) but most tasks aren't sequential transfers so that's not a huge deal. Laptop drives tend to have other factors such as being lower power which also limit performance. But unless you're really ragging it, with a decent amount of ram the performance should be just fine.

Incidentally angular velocity is the same (rpm measures angular velocity so all 7200s are the same), it's linear velocity that's lower with smaller platters.

[Timmy!!!]

Ah well I seem to be wrong at just about everything Ill just go and bury my head in the sand.

Yep you are right, angular velociity stays the same, its linear speed that changes as radious increases. silly me

Interesting stuff you have said, so one day when the technology allows us we may well switch to laptop size 15k rpm disks as this will be the best of both worlds.

[Butcher]

Won't see a 15k in a laptop anytime soon, the power requirements are too high.

I've got a dead 15k here, I'll crack it open and see how big the platters actually are.

[rajagra]

Won't see a 15k in a laptop anytime soon, the power requirements are too high.

They could always add in a second set of heads, much like those funky True-X CD drives that never really took off.
That could work really well in a HD, esp if used intelligently with command queueing.
I would patent the idea, but I'll bet IBM got there first.

[ERU]

I'd say it was deffo the ram too - get it up to 512mb

[Butcher]

15k RPM HDD platters:

Note how small they are compared to the size of the drive. Only 65mm across - not much bigger than a typical laptop HDD.

[Timmy!!!]

Wow thanks for the pic, I never knew how small the platters were compared to normal hard drives. My god they must whine though.

[[GSV]Trig]

Learn something new everyday eh...

[zaphod]

wow thats is cool..nice pic The whine is probable so hi pitched you wouldn't even hear it. So thats why they call you Butcher huh?!?

[Butcher]

Screams like a banshee (it's a first gen 15k which didn't help, later models run quieter and cooler), I have pretty good hearing alas so I could hear it. The drive was dead before I opened it BTW, I'm not crazy enough to crack open a working disk.

Why it died:

Must have got knocked during a move or such.