TravelStar 7K200 and 5K250 Beat the Band

Hitachi Climbs The Notebook Hard Drive Olympus

In addition to the recent performance and capacity jumps in the 2.5" space, two technologies have emerged that make it increasingly difficult for enthusiasts to select the right hard drive solution. Hybrid hard drives (H-HDDs) provide an additional 256+ MB of Flash memory to buffer operating system data and frequently used application data. These drives are meant to reduce waiting times for the user, and also reduce power consumption by working off the Flash memory and switching off the spindle motor when it's not needed. Samsung and Seagate already have H-HDDs, but they require Windows Vista to play their Flash card, and the benefit is still small.

The second technology to compete with mechanical hard drives builds entirely on Flash memory to create ultra-fast Flash Solid State Drives (SSDs). We looked at a first Samsung Flash SDD 32 GB prototype last year and, at a first model that is available at retail, SanDisk's SSD SATA5000, also holding 32 GB. These Flash SSDs provide exceptional read latencies and good to excellent throughput, but they suffer from long write latencies. In fact, write latency is several times longer than the access time we get from conventional hard drives. Paired with the high cost of $250 and up for only 32 GB, Flash SSDs aren't necessarily the ultimate choice for performance users, given that Windows Vista alone eats up approximately 10 GB.

In the end, the classic hard drive doesn't look all that bad, as the latest generation delivers almost 60 MB/s (5,400 RPM) or 70 MB/s (7,200 RPM) at only $180 and $200 retail. In contrast, you should be prepared to fork out at least $350 for a 32 GB Flash SSD and more than ten times as much for the 128 GB Supertalent drive, which we'd consider spacious enough for enthusiasts.

Join our discussion on this article!

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.