
Everyone in the computer industry is already familiar with the technological marvels of desktop hard drives, the capacity of which now approaches an amazing half a teraByte (500 GB). However, some remarkable advances in compact drive technology have gone largely unnoticed. An increasing number of multimedia devices are shipping with 1.8" micro-drives installed. The many MP3 players that include such drives are just the tip of a substantial iceberg, as the list of potential applications for high-capacity, tiny drives continues to grow.
One need only consider, for example, infotainment systems in automobiles. Here, where radios and navigation systems are typically delivered in compact standard form factors, space is at a premium. Navigation systems with map-driven databases that sometimes even include 3D visualizations won't always fit on a single DVD. Similarly, there is increasing demand for mobile access to e-mail and other Internet data sources, and high-quality music and video - all of these drive the market inexorably toward providing disk drives with large amounts of storage space.
It's also likely that you'll soon begin seeing more and more 1.8" form factor hard drives in notebooks and other handheld devices, such as PDAs and cell phones. This is the only way that this kind of equipment will be able to dip below the magic 2 pound weight barrier. Samsung delivers a convincing proof of this concept in its Manager-Notebook Q30, which shows what a really portable computing device looks like.
Toshiba's 1.8" (actual size) MK3006GAL drives enjoy great popularity right now. That's because they are no bigger than PCMCIA cards, and can use the same connectors to link up to devices. This micro-drive is also entirely compatible with the widely used UltraATA/100 interface standard.

On first inspection, this 30 GB "mighty mite" doesn't look much like a hard disk. Toshiba delivers all 30 GB on a single disk platter, which rotates at 4200 RPM, resulting in low energy consumption and quiet operation - important attributes for a small form-factor disk drive. The built-in controller also includes a 2 MB data cache.
The determining characteristics of hard drive performance include both data density on the platter and platter rotation speed - together, these determine how fast data passes under the drive's read/write heads. Given the geometry of a rotating circular platter, the data moves under the heads fastest on the outer edge, since that's where circumference is greatest. This means that larger platters offer better performance than smaller ones. Given the small size of this drive's platters, it was obvious that our testing wouldn't reveal very high data transfer rates, and that is in fact what we observed.
To put this 1.8" hard drive to work we needed two adapters. The first makes it possible to use the same compact interface that's also used for 2.5" drives. The second allows us to hook up the drive to a conventional Ultra ATA controller. With these items in place, disk controllers old and new alike recognize this device without any complaint.
As expected, in testing this device maintains a top transfer speed of 22 MB/s; it could never keep up with any 2.5" (or larger) drive. As a point of comparison, for example, the fastest 2.5" drive we've tested - the Hitachi Travelstar 7K60 - practically doubles the MK3006GALs' top speed. The interface itself is more than fast enough, with a top speed of 80 MB/s. Seek times for the MK3006GAL were surprisingly good, however: the 19 ms we measured for the device is about the same as what we found for 2.5" hard disks with the same rotational speed.
The manufacturer makes drive configuration absurdly easy: the drive always assumes the role of master on the channel, unless you change a jumper to switch it to slave. It's not likely that anyone would use this drive as a master to any other drive as slave, but Toshiba probably figured that in most cases the unit will be used by itself on a channel, and set its defaults accordingly.

It's worth emphasizing that our test of this compact Toshiba hard disk surely doesn't address the most typical real-world installation scenario, as evidenced by our need to procure two adapters to connect it to our standard test system. Any OEM or system integrator would mount the device permanently somewhere, so the only effort would be mating the connector on the drive to the matching connector on the controller. We used an adapter from Wiebetech for this test, although there are others available.



While they obviously don't excel in terms of performance, 1.8" drives offer many advantages. The physical characteristics of the drive help underscore this: at less than 2 ounces (51 g) the MK3006GAL has to be one of the lightest disk drives around. With a maximum theoretical data capacity of 30 GB, one of these platters weighs little, but is a league of its own in terms of flexibility. It is also energy-efficient, because this drive consumes only tiny amounts of power relative to its larger cousins.
While it might not seem so just looking a the two numbers, the size difference between a 1.8" drive and a 2.5" drive is immense. And for those concerned with achieving as much miniaturization of computer systems as possible, every little bit helps.
Test Setup
| Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz
256 kB L2 Cache (Willamette) |
| Motherboard | Intel 845EBT
Intel 845E Chipset BIOS BT84520A.86A.0024.P10 |
| Memory | 256 MB DDR/PC2100, CL2.0
Micron/Crucial |
| Controller | i845E UltraDMA/100-Controller (ICH4)
On-Board USB 2.0 (ICH4) On-Board FireWire |
| Graphics card | ATI Radeon SDRAM, 32 MB |
| Network | 3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit |
| Operating system | Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600
Service Pack 1 |
| Benchmarks & Measurements | |
| Office performance | ZD WinBench 99 - Business Disk
Winmark 2.0 c't h2benchw |
| High-End performance | ZD WinBench 99 - High-End Disk Winmark 2.0 |
| Performance measurements | c't h2benchw 3.6 |
| I/O performance | IOMeter 2003.05.10 |
| Drivers & Settings | |
| Graphics driver | 5.1.2001.0 (Windows XP Standard) |
| DIE driver | Intel INF Drivers 5.02.1003 |
| DirectX version | 9.0c |
| Resolution | 1024x768, 16 Bit, 85 Hz |
Data Transfer

Benchmarks




Many performance-oriented readers will raise their eyebrows in response to the MK3006GAL's measured transfer rates. These days, 22 MB/s really isn't very fast, considering that desktop drives routinely reach data transfer rates of 70 MB/s, and next-generation notebook drives are in the range of 40 MB/s.
However, these results must be interpreted in the context of what is possible for such a small drive, as well as its likely applications. Those who install such a tiny drive are concerned about considerations other than sheer performance - especially, they care about reduction of volume and weight for mobility. For MP3 players or similar portable multimedia devices, the performance this device delivers is certainly adequate. Even when this kind of drive is used in a notebook or other portable computer, both vendors and customers understand that the added mobility it enables has a cost in terms of performance.
With its MK3006GAL drive Toshiba offers a modern storage device that's sure to find all kinds of interesting and useful applications in both current and future products. Certainly 30 GB is not a tremendous amount of storage by today's standards, but as with the matter of performance, the capacity is a reasonable trade-off for the drive's compact dimensions and low weight.