Hard disk drives have been around for a few decades now and though they still work on the same principals. A handful of decades passed and the technology is still the same but the interpretation has improved a lot. A 1TB hard drive is not out of reach anymore, it’s here and you can buy it reasonably cheap.

Laptop harddrives are closing up on their desktop cuisines, though there are still some differences between them.

First of all, as the name suggests they’re made for the laptop market. This requires a few modifications in the recipe. They have to be less power consuming. The battery life of a notebook is down to a few key variables, one important of these is the consumption of the storage media.

If a laptop hard drive takes too much power it reduces battery life dramatically. Second, it has to be small enough to fit a notebook computer. A normal 3.5″ hard drive would hardly fit any notebook, and there are netbooks that can’t even hold a 2.5″ version, there are 1.8″ drives for those.

The most common laptop harddrive is the 2.5″ version, with a few trick featured to keep consumption low and data transfer rates high. A laptop hard drive has smaller platters, therefore data has to be shrunk more than it is in a normal desktop HDD.

This makes reading the data on the fly a little harder, so cheaper drives are spinning the disks at 4200 rpm or 5200 rpm, which is good for power consumption, and with the more dense data structure good for the data read speed as well.

Laptop hard drives usually have a special connector in place to solve some room issues. A normal 80 wire ribbon cable wouldn’t really fit, would it. Most manufacturers skip cabling altogether, the drive connects to the reader interface inside directly.

Laptop hard drives are a little smaller in capacity. For example a 1.5TB hard drive in desktop computers isn’t hard to get, but a 1TB notebook hard drive is going to be extremely pricey if you find one at all. A 500GB model is much easier to find, and I think that it should be enough for anyone who uses their laptop computers as a secondary computing device in parallel with a desktop PC.

A cheaper HDD costs about $80 to $100, so a dead hard drive should be relatively easy and cost effective to replace, but those who want to ditch their hard drives for an SSD a bigger price tag is in place