What Is The Best Mini Notebook Hard Drive?
People buying a mini notebook computer will often find a large variety of options when it comes to deciding on which hard drive you want. Not only do you have a decision between the size of the drive and the speed of the drive, but with the introduction of a new type of hard drive which is often refereed to as a SSD drive, which stands for solid state drive, you’ve got more options than ever. Today we’re going to try and define some of the common terms associated with hard drives and also look at the advantages, disadvantages, and prices of each. By the time we’re doing you’ll know exactly what type of hard drive is right for your mini notebook.
What is an SSD (solid state drive)? I solid state drive is similar to the memory card that you have in your digital camera. It gets it’s name because unlike the standard hard drive that had a platter and moving parts inside, the SSD drive has no moving parts and instead uses a flash style to write the data to the drive. This has a large group of advantages including a large reduction in the amount of heat that is given off which is a big plus if you’ve ever used a laptop before you’ll remember how hot they get. Some of the other differences between your typical camera memory card and a SSD drive is how fast data can be written and the size of the drives. SSD drives come in many sizes all the way up to 120GB and higher, while most mini notebooks come with a size between 2GB and 16GB.
How does a typical hard drive work? The typical mini notebook hard drive or any computer hard drive for that matter has a group of platters with an arm that that writes data to the platters. The two main advantages of this style of mini laptop hard drive is that it’s cheap due to the fact that they’ve been around for awhile and they also come in very large storage sizes. They have models in the 1000GB or 1TB size, but the normal size drive you would see in a mini notebook is somewhere between 160GB and 250GB’s. I’ve also recently seen a few models around the 320GB size. The main disadvantage to these types of drives is the heat they produce from the moving parts inside. The moving parts also are more fragile if the mini laptop is accidentally bumped or dropped.
So what hard drive is right for you? Well it really comes down to storage. If you plan on storing a lot of stuff on your mini notebook such as music and photos then you’re most likely going to want to get a standard hard drive in at least a 160GB size. However if you’re using this as a second computer to mainly surf the internet and purchased it for its portability then going with a SSD hard drive will most likely be a better fit for your mini notebook or netbook.
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