The Serial ATA interface has recently arrived to the realm of hard disk drives of the 2.5” form-factor.

Actually, we had expected the introduction of this interface would be more aggressive there, as notebooks are exactly the type of computer that would enjoy the small connectors and simple wiring of Serial ATA. Intel, the industry locomotion, must be the reason for this slow progress since it hasn’t yet released its notebook chipsets with support of SATA.

Anyway some manufacturer dared produce drives with the fashionable interface and, however strange it may seem, these drives do find their customer. So, our today’s test session does make sense!

Testing Participants

We’ve got nine drives from five manufacturers: two drives from each Hitachi and Seagate, one drive from each Samsung and Toshiba, and three drives from Fujitsu. The basic technical characteristics of the devices are presented in the tables below:

The DK23FB model is one of the two drives in this review to use two platters to achieve the capacity of 40 gigabyte. This fact alone suggests that the drive is close to being obsolete.

The 5K80, on the contrary, is rather young. Moreover, this series has been recently “reinforced from above” by a 100GB model, but it is not that giant, but a modest and widespread 40GB model that will take part in our today’s tests.

Samsung is represented with an MP0402H drive from the SpinPoint M40 family. The drive uses one platter and two heads; its cache buffer is 8 megabytes big.

The 4026GAX drive from Toshiba is remarkable for having the biggest buffer among the test participants – 16 megabytes!