Six 2.5” High-Capacity Notebook Hard Drives

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Advanced Format technology makes it possible to build 9.5 mm high 2.5” hard disks with 500 GB per platter. The result is a range of slim and speedy storage giants.

Benchmark Results: Access Time And I/O Performance

The low-level benchmark h2benchw directly accesses the hard disk and ignores the OS-imposed sector alignment. In light of the fact that five out of six test candidates employ 4 KB AF sectors and emulate 512-byte sectors, we find this benchmark very interesting.

The results of h2benchw aren’t so clear-cut, though. The 7200 RPM models tend to be in front. But the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT encroaches into their territory and posts comparable access times. The Toshiba drive dominates the read test and is almost twice as fast as the competitors.

As notebook hard disks, the test candidates are not really optimized for database, Web server, or workstation access patterns. But the benchmark results are quite clear: both Western Digital disks top the performance charts, while Toshiba’s MK6461GSYN posts mid-range results. Both Samsung disks and the Hitachi Travelstar 5K750 do not win any laurels in these workloads.

TOPICS
Manuel Masiero
25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • arpitnathany
    On the western digital hard disk page the Western Digital Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT is mentioned as 750 TB please correct it.

    Nice article as a whole
    Reply
  • arpitnathany
    On a lighter note I would love to have a 750 TB drive at that price
    someday.....
    Reply
  • acyuta
    Good to have all the latest data in one place. Wish Dell had put in the 750GB Scorpio Black instead of 750GB Momentus in my XPS15.

    One minor point: good to know that i7-920 is now part of Sandybridge. Can you check???
    Reply
  • JeTJL
    Wonder how well these things survive the drop test. If they can survive a fall that a SSD can sustain then I'll be up for it. Other than that wish higher capacity SSDs become cheaper.
    Reply
  • Zero_
    Talk about a bad time for a hard drive comparison...
    Reply
  • howardp6
    GoFlex is a Seagate disk product line not Western Digital
    Reply
  • AppleBlowsDonkeyBalls
    Western Digital hard drives sound good in theory for laptops, but they're not. I would never use one unless they fix a fatal flaw.

    What flaw? The fact that the hard drive automatically goes to sleep (parks its head) after eight seconds of inactivity, and since this is hardwired into the firmware it completely dismisses what you set in your Power Options in the Windows 7 Control Panel. Why is this bad? Because if the HDD is inactive for more than eight seconds it needs to unpark its head, and that creates a very noticeable lag when launching applications or working with files because the process takes a few seconds to complete, not to mention it puts more stress on the HDD mechanics.

    Unless it's simply for a storage drive where you don't care about performance I recommend you go with Seagate, Hitachi, or Samsung for laptop HDDs instead.
    Reply
  • cadder
    Current prices are a bit higher than what is mentioned in the article, actually pretty scary:

    Hitachi 750GB $140-160
    Samsung 1TB $220
    WD 750GB $160
    WD 1TB $230
    Reply
  • ewood
    yeah prices are way off
    Reply
  • youssef 2010
    I'd go with the WD Scorpio Black
    Reply