Laptop hard drives come in the 2.5-inch form factor and are connected to the rest of the PC systems via the SATA III interface, which replaced SATA II years ago. Besides rotational speed, size of an HDD’s cache memory which is usually either 8 or 16MB, also affects performance. However, 7,200 rpm HDDs for laptops are a rarity on the market and don’t improve overall performance much. HDDs in select notebooks spin at 7,200 rpm, making read / write speeds and access to data somewhat quicker. Rotational speed of platters of 5,400 rounds-per-minute is the standard one for laptop-use hard drives. On the positive side, HDD is the cheapest kind of storage. In comparison to solid state drives, hybrid drives, and eMMC storage, they’re characterized by longer system boot-up times, slower application and file loading, and slower file copy / paste command execution. In today’s era of fast processors and large system memory amounts, hard drive is oftentimes a system performance bottleneck. HDDs are the slowest kind of storage in modern PCs. They are based on rotating magnetic platters and reading heads. You can find them in the vast majority of notebooks, especially inexpensive ones.
Hard disk drives or HDDs are traditional storage devices for personal computers. The article also contains a table of required space by various software and common user document and media files, so you can sum them up and calculate how much space you actually need.
In this article, we will explain the main differences between four storage types you can find in modern Windows-based laptops and other portable PCs – hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), hybrids (HHDD / SSHD), and eMMC storage. Your choice of internal data storage device will depend on performance and cost, but also on your storage capacity needs. When buying a new laptop, 2-in-1, or tablet PC, its data storage capabilities are among the most important factors for your purchase decision.