What is the Best Mini Notebook Hard Drive
What is the difference between an SSD hard drive and the typical hard drive that comes in a laptop? Well the SSD, which has been so popular in the mini notebooks, stands for Solid State Drive. Basically it has no moving parts, which has a lot of advantages that we’ll talk about. It also unfortunately has a few disadvantages, namely the sizes that are available.
- Heat – Moving parts create more heat that ones that don’t. The typical hard drive has little platters inside that spin as data is written to the drive where as the SSD drive just writes the data in a similar way to a USB flash drive. Needles to say the SSD provides very little heat compared to the typical drive.
- Size – When the mini notebooks first came out the SSD drives came in 2GB and 4GB sizes which were very small, but after a few months it became more common to see anywhere from 16GB – 32GB in size. 32GB is a great size for a small netbook, but if you decide to go with the typical hard drive you’ll jump all the way to a 160GB drive. Make sure you take this into account when you are picking out your mini notebook. If you plan on storing music or a lot of photos on your netbook then the typical hard drive might be a better choice.
Power – This one is highly debated and I wouldn’t make your decision on which style drive you get based on the power consumption of each. I’m calling this one a wash. There have been tests that prove each is better. I have bad both and didn’t’ notice any difference in the battery life.
- Cost – Another factor that comes up is cost when picking their hard drive style. Again this one shouldn’t be a determining factor. I haven’t seen any large differences in the cost between the SSD and standard hard drive.
The biggest factor here is how much disk space you need. I personally went with the 160GB standard drive and after having it for 3 months I really was wishing I would of got the SSD drive instead. I wasn’t using anywhere near the space and the heat actually bothered me quite a bit. Check out any of your local Target, Best Buy or any other local electronics store and you should be able to feel the heat difference after using the mini notebook for a bit.