Gaming Laptops Get Bigger and Faster Drives
The divide between gaming desktops and laptops just got a bit smaller. Today Seagate announced that its 2.5-inch, 320GB, 7,200-rpm, Momentus 7200.3 hard drive is now available as an option in Dell XPS laptops and will be available soon in some Alienware laptop models.
"Seagate's new 2.5-inch hard drive delivers up to 320GB of capacity and combines a fast Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/second interface with 7200-rpm spin speed and a 16MB cache to enable the highest-performance laptops ever. The drive also is offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology, to help prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped."
Dell's online configurator for the XPS M1730
Hard drives with 7,200-rpm speeds are already an option for some Alienware laptops--however, currently only up to a 250GB capacity. These 250GB drives have been available in single drive, and dual-drive RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations, as well as an additional drive in the laptop's Smart Bay. This means that when Alienware makes the 320GB Momentus 7200.3 available, some laptop models could be configured with almost 1TB of 7,200-rpm-based hard disk storage space (320GB x 3 drives = 960GB). Many gamers like to do complete installs of their games, so that they won't need the install disc whenever they want to play an installed game.
It should be noted, however, that Seagate is not the only hard drive manufacturer churning out 2.5-inch, 7,200-rpm, 320GB drive: Hitachi's Travelstar 7K320 has similar specs.
Having this much hard disk storage capacity on a laptop is not unique. But higher storage capacity on small form-factor hard drives usually means slower rotations speeds in the 4,200-rpm and 5,400-rpm range. Now that laptops are coming with quad-core processors and multiple GPUs, having desktop-like hard disk speeds and capacities means that a properly-configured laptop can give desktop gaming rigs a run for their money.
Which gets us thinking... When will we see liquid-cooled gaming laptops that can be overclocked?
