Next-Gen 7,200 RPM Notebook Hard Drives

Results: Transfer Diagrams

There is not much to say: the Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 starts at 80 MB/s, and still provides 40 MB/s when you fill the entire drive with data (which forces the use of the inner sectors, which rotate at slower absolute speed).

The Spinpoint MP2 provides slightly higher transfer rates than the Hitachi drive, but it shows noticeable spikes. If you have to rely on certain transfer rates, make sure that you only look at the lowest transfer speeds.

This is the throughput winner: Seagate’s Momentus 7200.3 provides almost 90 MB/s read and write transfer rate, and it stays well below 40 MB/s at the end of the medium.

The new Scorpio Black is slightly slower than the Momentus 7200.3, but it drew a beautiful diagram. Performance is at a level where 3.5” desktop drives were only two years ago.