Conclusion

Now it’s time to do some summarizing. We’ll start with the 320GB models. The new Western Digital Scorpio with 160GB platters is just brilliant. It not only provides a storage capacity of nearly one third of a terabyte, but is also better or comparable to the best products from other manufacturers under most loads. We guess it is the fastest hard disk drive with a spindle rotation speed of 5400rpm we have ever tested in our labs so far. Western Digital has proved again that its products can be considered the best in this market sector. However, the high performance of this model is accompanied with high power consumption.

The Toshiba MKxx52GSX is just normal. It is inferior to same-class drives based on lower-density platters in many tests. However, it is indeed better than the previous-series MKxx46GSX drive which was the slowest of all in most of our tests.

The ST9250827AS model from the new Seagate 5400.4 series is good. It was able to compete and even outperform the 320GB Western Digital in some tests although has platters with lower recording density. We guess this series has one serious drawback only: like many other drives from Seagate, it is poor at multithreaded reading.

Winding this review up, we want to draw your attention to the Hitachi TravelStar 5K250. This drive delivered acceptable performance across many tests and was very effective at processing small files. Its main advantage is that its power consumption is considerably lower in comparison with its opponents. It will be interesting to see how the drives from the new 5K320 series, with higher recording density, will perform. Well, other manufacturers do not stand still: Fujitsu and Samsung have already announced 320GB models of their own. The competition is going to get even tougher!