Three Generations Of 1.8" Hard Drives Benchmarked

250GB: MK2529GSG (2009)

The second drive in this comparison is the 250GB 1.8” Toshiba flagship from 2008, the MK2529GSG. Compared to the 160GB drive it already delivers 24% higher read throughput (52.3 MB/s maximum) and increased I/O performance. PCMark Vantage also returns performance increases in the range of 10-25% depending on the particular benchmark workload.

Idle power is still at around 0.5W while peak power for streaming reads has gone down to 1.5W. The power required to play HD video off the drive is practically as low as the idle power at 0.5W. This shows that it is possible to power-optimize 1.8” drives for applications in which a limited, but constant stream of data has to be read or written. We also found it fascinating that intensive I/O operations would not increase the power consumption to the point measured when reading data at maximum speed. Instead, the MK2529GSG stays at only 1.1W. Again, power optimizations that come at the expense of higher I/O performance make this possible.

Compared to the previous generation, this drive almost doubles performance per watt for streaming reads and still introduces a 30% improvement in efficiency at I/O intensive workloads.