Quietness of 2.5" vs. 1.8" Notebook Drives

[wj777x]

I need to replace a 2.5" notebook drive. I can just purchase another
2.5" drive, or there's the possibility of getting a 1.8" drive and a
2.5" - to - 1.8" drive adapter. What II'm curious to know is if anyone
knows to what degree the 1.8" drives are quieter than the 2.5" drives.
They all seem to run at 4200 rpms, so I would think the smaller moter
and platter would make for a quieter drive. The problem is this is
just an assumption. I've looked for dB ratings for the smaller drives
but haven't found any as of yet.

If anyone has any dB info or any personal experience with these two
different size drives, I'd appreciate your sharing this knowledge.

Thank you.

William

 

[Tim_Mac]

hi william. bear in mind that a 4200 drive will give even more
miserable performance than a 5400 drive. although it should be
marginally quieter. a 10k raptor drive in comparison is a bit of a
tiger.
i've just swapped out my mechanical drive and replaced it with an 8Gb
compact flash card + IDE adaptor. the laptop is now totally silent
except for the quiet fan, and the performance benefit is amazing,
vista boots in about 15 seconds and programs load and close
instantly. vLite enabled a 2Gb vista installation and i don't need a
whole of software on the laptop anyway (office, visual studio, sql
server etc) so it has turned out great. thought you may be interested
if you want to reduce noise. getting rid of the hard drive should
also extend battery life, but i accept that not everyone will be happy
with such limited storage space. you could get a cheap 8 or 16 Gb USB
drive to help. a guide to the steps i took is online at
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=219225

tim

 

[wj777x]

Tim,

Thanks for your post. A Flash drive is a great idea, but I need more
space as the 2.5 laptop drive has been used in a desktop unit for its
relative quietness compared to a regular 3.5" drive. So I guess I'll
stay with another 2.5" drive.

Thanks again.

William

 

[John Turco]

Tim_Mac wrote:

i've just swapped out my mechanical drive and replaced it with an 8Gb
compact flash card + IDE adaptor. the laptop is now totally silent
except for the quiet fan, and the performance benefit is amazing,
vista boots in about 15 seconds and programs load and close
instantly. vLite enabled a 2Gb vista installation and i don't need a
whole of software on the laptop anyway (office, visual studio, sql
server etc) so it has turned out great. thought you may be interested
if you want to reduce noise. getting rid of the hard drive should
also extend battery life, but i accept that not everyone will be happy
with such limited storage space. you could get a cheap 8 or 16 Gb USB
drive to help. a guide to the steps i took is online at
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=219225

<edited>

Hello, Tim:

I followed the link you've provided, above...still, I'd be concerned about
flash memory's relatively limited number of rewrite cycles (approximately
100,000, typically), if I were you.

Good luck!


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>

 

[JW]

Tim_Mac wrote:



<edited>

Hello, Tim:

I followed the link you've provided, above...still, I'd be concerned about
flash memory's relatively limited number of rewrite cycles (approximately
100,000, typically), if I were you.

Some industrial flash is good for 2 million writes. Combine that with wear
leveling this is not as bad as you might think. We've shipped over a
thousand XP embedded systems on CF in the last few years, and I've yet to
see a drive wear out.

 

[John Turco]

Some industrial flash is good for 2 million writes. Combine that with wear
leveling this is not as bad as you might think. We've shipped over a
thousand XP embedded systems on CF in the last few years, and I've yet to
see a drive wear out.

Hello, JW:

Oh, I was already aware of "wear leveling," but, didn't know about that "2
million writes" stuff.

Thanks, for the info!


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>

 

[John Turco]

If you knew about wear leveling all along,
why do continue to post your paranoid claim about flash memory "wearing out"?

Hello, Eric:

No "paranoia" involved, wise guy. <g> Besides, if the Windows "page file" is
enabled, even 2,000,000 write cycles will be used up, pretty quickly -- wear
leveling, or not.


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>

 

[Rod Speed]

Raving Lunatic.

Easy to claim, hell of a lot harder to actually substantiate that claim.

Page file I/O is *much* less than your total I/O.

What matters is the write I/O. Your claim is just plain wrong with many Win systems.

Get some RAM if not.

You still get page file write I/O even with the maximum ram the system can handle.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hello, Eric:

No "paranoia" involved, wise guy. <g> Besides, if the Windows "page
file" is enabled, even 2,000,000 write cycles will be used up,
pretty quickly -- wear leveling, or not.

No flash can do 2'000'000 writes per cell. That is after wear
leveling and/or ECC. SLC flash does around 100'000 writes reliably
per cell. MLC is still stuck in the 10'000 range. However wear leveling
and ECC are facts and will extend device life significantly.
Some flash drives can even do defect remapping, AFAIK, which will
extend device life even more.

There are also things you can do to reduce wear. One thing is
realizing that pageing actually can be done on ramdisk to a degree.
Surprising, but true. Pageing is not only about having more memory,
but also about being able to use precious direcly mapped memopry in
multiple instances. Some OSes do not need to do that. Linux, for
example, runns pretty well without swap-space. XP is braind-damaged
that way and needs some minimal amount, which can be provided
on ramdisk.

Side note: The german computer magazine c't occasinally tries
to break FLASH devices by overwriting. So far they have not
succeeded with current memory sticks and SSDs.

Arno

 

[JW]

No flash can do 2'000'000 writes per cell.

http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS8GCF45I-D
"Endurance: 2,000,000 Program/Erase cycles"

 

[Arno Wagner]

id: <[email protected]>:

http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/ItemDetail.asp?ItemID=TS8GCF45I-D
"Endurance: 2,000,000 Program/Erase cycles"

I stated "per cell". They state nothing, so likely "per device"
as manufacturers tend to pick the biggest number.

Maybe also the "Built-in dynamic defect management and error
correction ECC technology" is a hint?

Arno

 

[JW]

I stated "per cell". They state nothing, so likely "per device"
as manufacturers tend to pick the biggest number.

I dunno, I'm figuring that they mean the entire device. But I could be
wrong.

 

[Arno Wagner]

id: <[email protected]>:

I dunno, I'm figuring that they mean the entire device. But I could be
wrong.

Well, same here. Basically it is unclear what the number means.

Arno

 

[Tim_Mac]

fact is... flash memory has been used successfully for a long time
before it's current mainstream introduction. but it is new to a lot
of people who don't trust it, which is also understandable. if you
are a skeptic, then wait another 5 years until you're comfortable with
it. in the meantime, let the early adopters prove you right or wrong,
either way they're doing you a favour

 

[Rod Speed]

Trivial to measure,

Nope, not with the vast raft of systems in use out there.

Grab an old HD, put pagefile on it, and compare disk's IO on with perfmon.

Says sweet **** all about how many use the amount of physical ram used in that test.

Bullshit, Rodbot. There is much more MFT and logfile IO than pagefile IO.

Easy to claim, hell of a lot harder to actually substantiate
that claim with the average system in use out there.

Which does not slow your system down, because it happens when disk are idle.

Irrelevant to whether its writes that may well be relevant to the life of flash memory.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

John Turco wrote in news:[email protected]

Hello, Eric:

No "paranoia" involved, wise guy. <g> Besides, if the Windows "page file"
is enabled, even 2,000,000 write cycles will be used up, pretty quickly --

You call JW a liar, Turco?

wear leveling, or not.

Well, there's the stupidity in that statement.
It's either 2,000,000 write cycles *with* or *without* wear leveling. If
without then obviously that's of no concern _unless_ the whole drive is used
for pagefile and all the 8GB is *actually used*, begin to end, cancelling out
wear leveling. That's a hell of a lot of paging.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Arno Wagner wrote in news:[email protected]
In which case this number would actually be awfully low.

Well, same here. Basically it is unclear what the number means.

And obviously it is far to difficult to compare them whith other ca-
pacities within the same product range and get a clue, right babblebot.

 

[John Turco]

Easy to claim, hell of a lot harder to actually substantiate that claim.


What matters is the write I/O. Your claim is just plain wrong with many Win systems.


You still get page file write I/O even with the maximum ram the system can handle.

Hello, Rod:

Thank you, for putting Eric "Clueless Canuck" Gisen, in his place. ;-)


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>

 

[John Turco]

fact is... flash memory has been used successfully for a long time
before it's current mainstream introduction. but it is new to a lot
of people who don't trust it, which is also understandable. if you
are a skeptic, then wait another 5 years until you're comfortable with
it. in the meantime, let the early adopters prove you right or wrong,
either way they're doing you a favour

Hello, Tim:

Sound advice, indeed! I, myself, was only advocating caution, during
my prior responses in this thread.


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>

 

[John Turco]

John Turco wrote in news:[email protected]

You call JW a liar, Turco?

<edited for brevity>

Hello, Folkert:

No...I'm calling >you< a troller, instead. <g>


Cordially,
John Turco <[email protected]>