Benchmark Results: Throughput And Interface Bandwidth
The 7200 RPM Travelstar 7K750 is the only new disk in this update claiming to be a performance-oriented 2.5" drive. Not surprisingly, it delivers solid results in the sequential read and write benchmarks, registering an average of 98 MB/s each. This is only slightly exceeded by Western Digital's Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT.
With spindle speeds of 5400 RPM, the other three disks predictably trail the 7K750. But the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000LPVT, Toshiba MQ01ABD100, and Hitachi Travelstar 5K1000 aren’t slow by any means. The slowest of the three trails Hitachi's 7K750 by a mere 10 MB/s, on average.
Hitachi's Travelstar 5K1000 is the only one of the four new hard disks sporting a 6 Gb/s SATA interface. In theory, this would give the drive a significant performance advantage over its competition. In reality, though, this measurement only really conveys performance between small data caches and the interface itself. Should a hit occur, you'd get a nice speed-up. But because these drives only have 8 or 16 MB buffers, this chart blows Hitachi's lead way out of proportion.