Half a Terabyte On Your Notebook

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Power Requirements

Page 1: 500 GB Drives for High-End Notebooks
Page 2: Not All 2.5” Drives Are Created Equal
Page 3: Three Platters: Hitachi Travelstar 5K500, 500GB
Page 4: Two Platters: Hitachi Travelstar 5K320, 320GB
Page 5: Record Throughput: Samsung Spinpoint H6 HM500LI, 500GB
Page 6: Drive Comparison Table
Page 7: Benchmark Results: Data Transfer Diagrams
Page 8: Read And Write Transfer Rates
Page 9: Interface Bandwidth And Access Time
Page 10: Application Performance: PCMark05 Windows XP Startup And Write Performance
Page 11: I/O Performance
Page 12: Power Requirements
Page 13: Conclusion: 500 GB Notebook Drives are Still Unbalanced

Power Requirements

We already mentioned that Hitachi did a great job in creating the three platter Travelstar 5K500, which maintains almost the same power requirements as the 320GB two platter Travelstar 3K320: both require approximately 1 watt of power when idle and 3 watts when active. Samsung’s new 500GB drive disappointed, as it requires 1.3 W in idle and up to 3.6 W under load. These are power consumption numbers we’d expect for 7,200 RPM drives, but not for a new three-platter 2.5” 5,400 RPM model.