I am missing my 7,200 rpm 60 GB Travelstar HDD I had installed in my SRX77. Does anyone know when we are going to be able to get anything a little faster - say 5,400 rpm 4 MB cache in the 1.8” form factor for the TR-series? I have poked around a couple of the drive manufacturers, but so far, no dice.

I think the TR’s biggest problem is miserable drive throughput, quite frankly. Everything else is great.

I don’t know if we’ll see faster variants this year (although I hope we do). I do expect to see larger capacity versions though. If they can pump out a 60 or 80GB version (with larger caches) then performance should increase due mostly to higher areal density. It won’t be like 7200RPM drives but at least there will be a boost.

I’d like to see some performance increase in the hard disk as well; however, not at the expense of power requirements. One of the reasons the TR lasts so long is that the hard disk draws very little power.

I guess we’ll wait and see. Perhaps later this summer/fall we’ll see an announcement for larger sized drives.

Power or battery life, power or battery life, power or battery life.

Must be hard for the bods that make these things to workout what parts to fit but it’s pretty clear with the TR that the design goal was battery life first, performance second. It still performs wonderfully I’m sure but the main buyers of ultra portables are people who are extremely mobile so battery life matters more to these people.

Personally if you have enough RAM I wouldn’t have thought the HD speeds makes too much difference to the performance of the system after bootup and slightly longer app load times. Once you have your app open it should run the same speed regardless.

I’d like to see larger drives and extra cache would be a bonus. Spin speed will cut battery and also make the laptop get hotter. Could make a reasonable drop in battery life that it might not be worth it.

I would get 7 hours of use from my SRX77 with the 7,200 rpm Travelstar and the extended battery. Since I had maxed out my Ram (384MB), I added the HDD, and performance improved by about 17%. Remarkable difference, without significant power draw - dropped from 8:30 to around 7:00 hours.

It would be nice to get that kind of improvement on my TR-series - I am not too concerned about carrying the extra weight of another battery.