Toshiba MK5056GSY (500GB)
The new, high-performance Toshiba MK5056GSY is the successor of Fujitsu’s hard drive lines, as Toshiba acquired Fujitsu’s entire hard drive business. Toshiba wanted Fujitsu's market share, but it also wanted the company's enterprise products and expertise.
A look at the new GSY family datasheet reveals that the basic specs are similar to the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500: 7,200 RPM, 16MB buffer, various capacities between 160GB and 500GB, and similar power specifications. Operating shock is limited to 325 G versus 400 G; the weight of 115 g is identical. SATA 3 Gb/s is still mandatory.
Toshiba published a MTTF number (mean time to failure) of 600,000 hours. Enterprise products typically have to reach at least a million hours, but this number is great for consumer devices. While MTBF describes any type of failure, MTTF is usually used for non-repairable failures. Note that this number entails running a large number of devices to find out when they’d eventually start to show issues. It conveys an average value, a mid-point in the failure bell curve.
The MK5056GSY has a slightly quicker access time than the Hitachi and Seagate drives, and it almost reaches the Travelstar 7K500’s 108 MB/s throughput. Its I/O performance is superior, though, and the Toshiba drive returned great scores in the PCMark Vantage HDD test, particularly for Windows Vista startup and application loading. In the other test runs, it remained slightly behind Hitachi. The 1W idle power is about the same value that other drives showed.
Unfortunately, power for HD video playback was much higher than on the two other 7,200 RPM drives: 1.7W versus 1.1W and 1.3W for Hitachi and Seagate, respectively. In exchange, the MK5056GSY is the most efficient 7,200 RPM drive when it comes to high I/O activity.
Related Stories :
- Install A Hard Drive Or SSD In Your Notebook's Optical Bay
- Do It Yourself: Upgrade A Notebook's Hard Drive
- Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: Does It Make Sense?
- Fujitsu Launches 500 GB Notebook Hard Drives – Full Drive Encryption
- Seagate Rolls Out Speedy 320 GB Notebook Hard Drive
- Fujitsu Announces 500 GB Notebook Hard Drive
- Seagate lanches 3 Gb/s notebook hard drive
- Fujitsu announces 300 GB notebook hard drive
- Find Your Notebook Hard Drive: 2.5" Performance Charts
- Toshiba fires up 200 GB perpendicular notebook hard drive
Can you also benchmark the noise level next time? I prefer a quiet PC :x
Can you also benchmark the noise level next time? I prefer a quiet PC :x
these are laptop drives so by nature they make very little noise.
wonder how is the performance when put 2 7K500 on RAID 0 compare to the 3.5" 7200RPM HDD
Great to see more variety at 500GB.
Nice article, except for the Vantage benchmark, i hope someday Tomshardware drop that type of benchmarks (same in games articles).
The WD7500BPVT from Western Digital has a 9.5mm height, not 12.5mm as you had mentioned as being non-standard. Whereas the WD10TPVT has a 12.5mm height. I also personally own a WD7500BPVT, and it works great in my 15" MacBook Pro Spring 2009 Model.
Why these drives aren’t 640GB? Clearly they are using two 320GB platters so 640GB is the max size and not 500GB.
HUH?!!?!? why is this news? I've had the Hitachi 7K500 (HTS725050A9A364) for over 4 month now, how is this news?!!?!
Hey, why didn't you include the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid in your charts? Would make it much easier to compare! Thanks.
no one ever benchmarks temperatures. you should do that.
Hmmm. So are these 4096 Byte sector drives?
Western Digital WD6400BEVT is a 640G drive according to WD. All the charts have it at 500G.
Temperatures don't affect hdd life except at the extremes.
nor do they effect it
Drive selection should be guided not by performance or cost but by reliability. Any extra megabyte per second or a few dollars off is nothing if the drive fails after a few months. For example the current Seagate drives have big reliability problems (check out user reviews on Newegg).
and how do u benchmark reliability?
Yes sir there are lots of things you can read on their web site but how reliable they are no one can tell until you bought one and it fails.
As I said, check out user reviews on Newegg. Newegg lists users who bought that particular product from them so you know they're not bogus reviews. If a Seagate drive has 20% one-egg (worst rating) reviews and Samsung drive has 8% one-egg reviews, that says a lot about the quality and reliability of the drives. Of course this only works for popular products but it's better than simply hoping you're buying a reliable drive.
My Hp Dv7 came with two MK5056GSY (raid 0) they are very impressive no vibrations to speak of and extremely quite as well I should mention that HP does have jell cushions on each contact point but very impressive.
I've been looking for the best/most reliable 2.5" 500Gb 7200rpm hard drive for my MacBook Pro. After all of that research the Toshiba sounds like a very solid hard drive. Still, it's only been out for a month or two (7/19/10) So I just can't be sure. I was about to grab the Momentus Xt, but I'm scared after hearing some of the reviews about reliability.