X-bit labs

High-Capacity 2.5-Inch Hard Disk Drives: Chasing the Leader

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 05/02/2006 | 09:05 PM ]

Today we would like to continue testing high-capacity 2.5-inch hard disk drives and within our today’s roundup we will introduce to you four new models from Samsung and Western Digital with 100GB+ storage capacities. We will not only compare them against one another but will also add up the results from our previous test session when we looked at the latest solutions from Seagate, Toshiba and Fujitsu.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Samsung SpinPoint M60 120GB and 100GB (HM120JC and HM100JC)
  
• Western Digital Scorpio 120GB and 100GB (WD1200VE and WD1000VE)
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter Sequential Read and Write Patterns
  
• Performance in WinBench 99
  
• Performance in FC-Test
  
• Conclusion
  

This time we decided to share with you the results of our tests performed on the highest-capacity hard disk drives of the 2.5-inch form-factor.

The storage capacity of these hard disk drives has been growing up lately. As we have already mentioned in our previous reviews, one of Seagate’s solutions has already hit 160GB storage capacity (for details see our article called Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB Hard Disk Drive with Perpendicular Recording Technology). None of the other vendors have reached or overcome this bar yet. Of course, all the HDD makers do their best to achieve this, but while they are still trying we suggest taking a closer look at the currently available 2.5-inch HDD solutions from different manufacturers that boast the highest storage capacity in their family.

We will primarily deal with 120GB and 100GB solutions today that are available in the product line-ups of all major HDD makers. We have already tested some of them before, so today we will focus mostly on the three new models in our labs: the new Samsung SpinPoint M60 and two Scorpio drives from Western Digital.

Note that all the drives tested today feature 5,400rpm spindle rotation speed, 8MB buffer and support ATA interface. The only exception is going to be the Toshiba drive that features a 16MB buffer and supports SATA interface.

You can check out the detailed specifications of the testing participants in our spec table here:

Click to enlarge