A New Toshiba 100 GB Notebook Drive at 5,400 RPM

Toshiba MK1032GAX In Detail

The dimensions and the basic technical data of 2.5" hard drives are by and large the same, though small differences may arise depending on how performance is measured.

As is usual for a hard drive of this class, the new Toshiba offering weighs in at just about 3.5 ounces (100 grams.) The 12 ms average seek time cited is a good value for a 5,400 RPM disk. We recorded an effective access time (including head positioning and latency) of 17.5 ms.

Far more interesting is the cache size, which is a whopping 16 MB. Toshiba was the first manufacturer to try out this size cache in notebook drives years ago. With the growth of hard drive performance and capacity, the increase in cache size only makes sense. The application benchmark WinBench 99 2.0 has a different view of things, however: it shows the Momentus 5400.2 and Western Digital's WD800VE being a shade faster.

There are no jumpers on 2.5" hard drives since they are not really designed for user configuration and mostly incapable of running as an ATA slave unit.