Next-Gen 7,200 RPM Notebook Hard Drives

Test Setups

Low-Level Benchmarks Test Setup : The Storage Reference System

We used our standard storage test system for all low-level performance benchmarks. This system has not been changed for more than three years, permitting perfect comparison among more than a hundred hard drives. We recommend looking at our 3.5” Hard Drive Charts and our 2.5” Notebook HDD Charts for performance comparisons of current and older hard drives.

Notebook Platform for Efficiency Testing : Dell Latitude D630

In addition to our mandatory testing, we added performance per watt testing using a Dell Latitude D630 notebook, and developed three benchmarks. The first runs workstation-type I/O operations using the IOmeter benchmark. The second is also based on IOMeter, but goes straight for streaming read performance, which results in the drives operating close to their maximum sequential throughput. For both benchmarks we’ll be providing the performance results, the average power consumption, and the performance per watt ratio. The third test looks at average hard drive power consumption required for delivering a small sequential data stream. To do this, we play a DVD .vob file off the test hard drives.