Laptops generally have a hard disk and optical drive. Sometimes when reading the specifications or ads for a laptop you may see a reference to spindles. Each drive in a laptop constitutes a spindle. Thus a system with a floppy, hard drive and DVD burner drive would have three spindles. But what do you need to know when reading the specifications for a laptop computer?
Hard Drives
The first factor is the speed of the hard drive. In most cases, laptop hard drives spin at a 5,400rpm speed. Some higher performance systems and desktop replacements will feature 7,200rpm drives. The high spin rate allows for better performance but also uses up more battery life when not plugged into an outlet. Conversely, some use the 4,200rpm speed with lower performance to either reduce power consumption or due to the lower cost for the drives.
Laptop drives are typically 2.5 inches in size and can range from 80 up to 500 GB in size. Most systems will have between 160 and 320 GB of data size that is more than enough for the standard laptop system. If you are looking at a desktop replacement class notebook to be a primary system, look at getting a 320GB or larger hard drive with the computer. Some of the ultraportable systems use the 1.8 inch PC card style hard drives. These range in size from about 40 to 300 GB.
Solid state drives are now starting to replace hard drives in some laptops. These use a set of flash memory chips rather than a magnetic platter to store the data. Presumably they provide faster data access, low power consumption and higher reliability. The downside is that they store much less data and cost much more than a traditional hard drive.
Drive accessibility matters in case you plan to upgrade your hard drive or to replace a damaged hard drive. Many laptops available in the retail channels have the hard drives installed internally. This means that only an authorized technician will be able to open up the computer to either repair or replace a damaged hard drive. This generally isn't a problem for many people, but in a corporate environment it can cause increased down time for a worker. Laptops that have drive bays that are accessible or swappable have the advantage of easy and quick access for upgrade or replacements.
CD, DVD and Blu-ray Drives
The optical drives are the key drive choice to make when purchasing a laptop computer. How the system is to be used is key to the selection of the proper optical drive for the system. It is pretty much a requirement to have an optical drive either in the computer or attached externally. Without an optical drive it will be more difficult to install new software onto the system. So if you are looking at an ultraportable, make sure to get an external drive or docking station with an optical drive or you will run into problems.
But what type of drive should you get on a laptop? Whatever type you do get, it really should be compatible with DVDs. One of the great advantages to laptops is their ability to be used as portable DVD players. Anyone who flies regularly has seen at least one person pull out a laptop and start watching a movie during the flight. A basic CD-ROM drive will be sufficient for loading applications and playing audio CDs, but why loose the functionality of a movie player. Some applications discs are now only shipped on DVD, so that can cause problems.
CD-RW drives are not common these days due to the low cost of DVD burners. They are useful for playing back audio CDs, loading software from CD-ROM or making minor backups. A CD-RW Combo drive has the ability to play or record CDs and also playback DVDs.
DVD writers are pretty much standard in the market these days for laptops. They can fully read and write both CD and DVD formats. This makes them extremely useful for those looking to watch DVD movies on the go or even editing together their own DVD movies. Dual layer drives have about twice the storage capacity (8.5GB) over traditional DVD media (4.7GB). Some drives also support burning labels directly to compatible media. The two systems for this are Labelflash and LightScribe.
Now that Blu-ray has become the defacto high definition standard, some higher end laptops are beginning to ship with these drives. Blu-ray combo drives have all the features of a traditional DVD burner with the ability to play Blu-ray movies. Blu-ray writers add the ability to burn lots of data or video to the BD-R and BD-RE media.
Here is a quick chart detailing the Optical Drive Options and the tasks they are best suited for:
- Basic computing w/DVD Playback: DVD-ROM
- CD Recording w/DVD Playback: CD-RW/DVD Combo
- DVD Recording: DVD Writer
- Hi-Def DVD Playback: Blu-ray Combo
- Hi-Def DVD Recording: Blu-ray Writer
With current component costs, there is almost no reason that a laptop would not have a DVD burner. Even most budget systems are featuring them now. It should also be noted that laptop drives are generally much slower than similar drives found in desktop systems.
