Three Generations Of 1.8" Hard Drives Benchmarked

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320GB: MK3233GSG (2010)

Last but not least this is Toshiba’s latest 1.8” flagship, which still maintains low power, but further increases capacity and performance. The 320GB capacity point currently cannot be reached by flash memory products at comparable prices. Toshiba also offers 250GB and 160GB models. This is the first 1.8” Toshiba hard drive that comes with 16MB instead of 8MB cache memory. Like its predecessor, it also comes with SATA 3 Gb/s and native command queuing.

The only downside of the latest product is an increased average access time, which went to 19.4 ms. This is typically rather unimportant for devices such as media players or MP3 players, but it might be something to consider for ultra portable PC solutions. It does have an impact on I/O performance as well, as this latest 320GB drive isn’t as fast as the 250GB MK2529GSG. Again, this is hardly an issue for consumer applications. In addition, all other performance metrics, especially the ones that are important for mobile computing and media devices went up: 58.7 MB/s maximum read and write transfer speed is as much as a 2.5” hard drive could deliver two years ago and PCMark Vantage returned numbers that prove the new 320GB drive to be superior in all disciplines.