Results: Access Time And I/O Performance
Not surprisingly, the notebook drives with faster spindles tend to lead the access time chart. There are exceptions, though, like WD's Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT, which comes in fifth place. The newer Travelstar 7K1000 HTS721010A9E630 takes the top spot, boasting 14.99 ms and 15.69 ms read and write accesses, respectively. The 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus and WD Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT are close behind.
Knowing full well that mechanical hard drives (much less those optimized for mobile applications) are unsuitable for I/O-intensive workloads, particularly in a world of affordable SSDs, we still run four stock Iometer profiles to determine the I/O throughput of each disk.
Spinning at 7200 RPM only slightly helps the Travelstar 7K1000 in our quartet of benchmarks, which simulate access patterns for databases, file servers, Web servers, and workstations. The drive consistently achieves a spot in the top third of our field, ranging from fourth to sixth place. Seagate's Momentus and Western Digital's Scorpio Black WD7500BPKT score highest.
