Buy Laptops

7. Laptop Hard Disk

Laptop Hard disks have many attributes, but the only one you really need to be concerned with is capacity.

Hard disk capacity is measured in Gigabytes (GB), and typically the smallest you will find in any modern laptop will be around 40GB.

Upper limits for laptop hard disks are around 500GB, which is a lot. A picture from your digital camera would be about 3 or 4 Megabytes (mb), and there are just over 1000mb in every 1GB of hard disk space, so 500GB could, in theory, hold around 125,000 photos from your camera, quite a lot i'm sure you'll agree!

A typical size hard disk in a laptop would be 80GB or 120GB, and most laptops currently come with hard disks of this size. As with everything in your laptop, its possible to upgrade this at the time of purchase, and your need to do this will depend on your use.

General users (email, word processing etc) are unlikely to need more than the standard size hard disk that will come with the laptop. If you plan on loading your laptop with all your favorite music and movie files then you should upgrade to the biggest hard disk you can afford. Music and movie files eat up hard disk space fast, and if you skimp on the hard disk capacity, you'll soon find you need to delete files to make room for new ones because you have hit the limit of what the hard disk can hold.

Fast spin

There is one more element that you may (or may not) wish to consider, but its of far less importance than the capacity, and that is the speed of the hard disk.

Hard disks, as well as varying in capacities, also vary in speeds, speed relates to the rate at which the disks inside spin around, fairly simple.

Spin speeds are rated in RPM (Revolutions per minute) and on laptops you will typically find the hard disks spin at either 4200rpm, 5400rpm or 7200rpm, you may find spin speeds other than these in laptops but its unlikely.

Obviously the faster the spin speed the faster the hard disk can retrieve data, which is a good thing. But don't get caught up in getting a laptop with a higher spin speed, its not the most important factor, certainly the capacity should be of more importance.

Conclusion

Hard disk capacity in your laptop is what you should be concerned with, email and word processing will only require 40 or 60GB hard disk at most. Music or movie lovers and possibly graphics workers should go for a drive that offers a much bigger capacity, something like a 160 or 240GB hard disk (or bigger!).