Notebook Hard Drives: 750GB And 640GB Models Reviewed

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Remember when 500GB was the most you could get from a notebook drive? It seems like most vendors have made the transition to 640GB. Western Digital even has its own 750GB model that fits within the 9.5 mm z-height. So, which of these drives is the best?

Benchmark Results: Throughput And Interface

We have a new winner when it comes to throughput. WD’s 750GB Caviar Blue reaches 95.6 MB/s, which is an all-time high for a 5,400 RPM drive. Samsung’s Spinpoint M7E is very close behind, but WD maintains better minimum throughput and is closest to the 7,200 RPM drives.

A streaming test with IOMeter confirms the results, but puts Samsung on top this time.

Interface performance is only important for seeing how fast the drive can transfer data into and from the cache memory. In real life, this number is negligible.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos