Laptop Hard Drives -- Bigger is Still Better

There isn't much speed difference between SATA and PATA hard drives. PATA drives allow a transfer rate of 100 Mbs., with bursts up to 133 Mbs. SATA drives allow a transfer rate of 150 Mbs. Most people will not notice a difference.

SATA drives are clearly the better choice however. They have several clear advantages.

They use less power-- I've told you power turns to heat.
Your laptop will be cooler-- That should allow it to live longer.

The lower power use can translate into longer battery life. Another advantage is that they use what is called a parallel connection, while PATA hard drives use a serial connection. While the parallel connection is one way (at a time) and theoretically slower, it is effectively faster as used.

This allows several good things. The cables used for the connection are much narrower than the serial cables used for PATA drives. They also can be longer. This allows them to be routed in a way where they interfere less with air flow and allow the laptop computer's cooling to work better. Since a special SATA connection is present, this frees up the IDE connections for optical drives (DVD or CD) which still use them. If you have more than one hard drive, the connections are simpler. There is no need to designate a master hard drive as you must with serial connections.

Notebook hard drives and video cards are the hottest component in your laptop computers, so these advantage are significant.Remember that the faster it spins, (higher rpm) the more power a hard drive uses and the more heat it generates. This makes the 7200 rpm drives unattractive unless you have the additional cooling usually included in high end gaming laptops.

There are also other hard drives, solid state drives, available.

I'd still suggest that you buy the largest laptop hard drive you feel you can afford. Files will expand to exceed the available space.

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