X-bit labs

Roundup: Nine 2.5-Inch Hard Disk Drives with 40GB Storage Capacity (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Alexey Volkov , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 01/20/2005 | 06:01 PM ]

Seagate puts forth two drives from the Momentus 5400.1 family. Both models (ST94811A and ST94011A) should be known to you by our earlier reviews, so we just want to remind you the main difference between them: the ST94811A comes with 8 megabytes of cache memory, and the ST94011A with only 2 megabytes.

Fujitsu is going to be the dark horse of this competition as it is this company that dared begin to produce 2.5” Serial ATA devices. This policy of running ahead of the times may help them keep their market share, but some quite a big risk is involved in the process. :)

The MHS2040T model is presented as an ATA drive on the manufacturer’s website and we don’t really know why the sample we got had the Serial ATA interface. It must be an engineering sample, because the idea of equipping an initially weak drive (4200rpm spindle speed among other things) with a fast interface can only be regarded as a very brave experiment. :)

Testbed and Methods

We tested the drives on the following testbed:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard (i865PE chipset);
• Intel Pentium 4 2400MHz CPU (533MHz FSB);
• 256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM, CL2;
• IBM DTLA-307015 system drive;
• ATI RADEON VE graphics card;
• Windows 2000 Pro with Service Pack 4.

We attached the ATA drives via an adapter to a Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller (BIOS 2.20.0.14 and driver 2.0.0.29). The SATA drives were attached to a Promise SATA150 TX2 plus controller (BIOS 1.00.033 and driver 1.0.0.27).

The versions of the drives’ firmware are listed below:

We used the following benchmarks:

• WinBench 99 2.0;
• IOMeter 2003.02.15;
• FC-Test v1.0 build 11.

For WinBench tests we partitioned the drives in FAT32 and NTFS as one logical volume with the default size of the cluster (we use Paragon Partition Manager for FAT32 partitioning). Then we ran each test seven times and chalked up the best result. The HDDs didn’t cool down between the tests. For FC-Test we divided the drives into two logical volumes, 20GB each. In IOMeter tests we used Sequential Read, Sequential Write and Workstation patterns. For details about the patterns you can refer to our previous reviews.