Perfect Notebook Storage: Seven 2.5” 500 GB Drives

Fujitsu MJA2500BH

Fujitsu’s first 500 GB hard drive was the MHZ25000BT, which was based on three platters and a 12.5 mm height. Unfortunately, it was a 4,200 RPM drive, leading to insufficient performance for upper-class notebook systems; as a result, the MHZ2 BT was primarily offered to OEMs, which wanted these drives for media center PCs or similar solutions. The new MJA2 BH series also reaches 500 GB, but at a quicker 5,400 RPM spindle speed and using only two platters. This results in idle and peak power consumption that are slightly higher than the three-platter drive, but more power-efficient reads and writes.

The drive has 8 MB cache and a second-gen 3 Gb/s interface with NCQ support. We measured a maximum read throughput of over 82 MB/s on our new storage test system, which is a great result, as most of the 500 GB notebook drives deliver a similar maximum.

Write throughput is slightly behind Hitachi, WD and Seagate, but the difference is minor. The 18.4 ms access time is fast enough for typical applications and very much an average result for 5,400 RPM 2,5” drives; the only benchmark that the Fujitsu drive was unable to dominate was our IOMeter testing. The Fujitsu drive is strong in almost all sections of the PCMark Vantage HDD test, it delivered the lowest low power idle requirement of 0.7 W, and also featured nice, low power requirements for streaming, I/O activity and video playback.

Fujitsu makes the drive available at 500, 400, 320, and 250 GB capacity points. You can find more information on the Fujitsu Web site.

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