The 2.5" vs. 3.5" RAID Challenge

2.5" Fujitsu MHT2060BS

The drive you will find on the Fujitsu website is the MHT2060BH, which is the current 5,400 RPM notebook hard drive equipped with SATA. The 2060BS is a product variant validated for 24/7 operation in server environments.

Unfortunately, we only had four of these hard drives available, and it would have been nice to explore I/O performance with a larger number of drives. Based on the technical data, one can be absolutely sure that a 2.5" four drive array will not be able to stand up to a setup consisting of four 3.5" drives.

The MHT series is available in 40, 60 or 80 GB capacities, and runs at an adequate speed of 5,400 RPM. Fujitsu quotes a seek time of 12 ms. In addition, these drives are equipped with 8 MB cache memory and a SATA interface providing a theoretical bandwidth of 150 MB/s.

2.5" SATA drives have not been widely available since there was no mobile platform available to support SATA until recently. In January, Intel introduced the 915GM chipset for Centrino/Pentium M, which finally initiated the move to SATA in the mobile sector. Although this transition likely will be a pretty slow one, there are features such as command queuing speaking clearly in favor of SATA.

Those concentrating on business applications may also find interesting the small dimensions and low energy consumption figures of this drive. At just 9.5 W while reading or writing, the Fujitsu drive requires only a quarter of the power required by the 3.5" WD1600SD desktop drive. This ratio looks even better in idle mode: 0.85 W vs. 8.75 W for the 3.5" drive.

  • If you look closely you will see that this review compared 5400rpm 2.5" drives with 7200rpm 3.5" drives.

    Which makes it completely useless and flawed. I seriously can't believe Tom's did that. Maybe if there had been 5400rpm 3.5" drives included, some useful information could be gleaned from the tests.

    This entire article should be deleted just to save face, if not disk space. This article's very existence makes me embarrassed for Tom's Hardware.
    Reply
  • Agree
    This is ridiculous
    the outside speed of the platter !!
    I cannot believe it .. you wait one turn never mind where your data are located and at 7200rpm your platter may be 1 meter in diameter it is not going to change anything it will stl be one rouind trip
    You will wait one turn ( 1/7200th of a second )
    It ain't go faster nor slower mechanically
    The heads are another story

    Reply