Conclusion

Our today’s testing session gave us some food for thought. With the help of Hitachi 7K60 hard disk drive we saw how big of a performance improvement a 2.5” HDD can obtain due to simple speeding up of their spindle to 7,200rpm. I have no doubts other manufacturers will regard this product as a checkpoint and come up with their own 7,200rpm HDD solutions.

Hitachi 7K60 was the best in every test and confirmed its superiority over other models in nearly every respect. So if you want to have a miniature drive with the maximum performance, you should seriously consider this one.

Another newcomer from Hitachi, the 5K80, announced along with the 7K60, looks good, too. Besides good speed characteristics, it offers the maximum capacity for today – 80GB (against 40GB by Seagate Momentus and 60GB by Hitachi 7K60).

According to the test results we saw today, Seagate Momentus is going to be the main opponent to Hitachi 5K80 – it is better across a number of applications.

These three devices went unrivalled through all the tests. That’s good as newer models must be better than older ones – this is the rule of progress.

However, two drives of the older generation (Hitachi DK23FB) were not that hopeless altogether; sometimes they even defeated the youngsters.

The spindle rotation speed of 4,200rpm greatly slowed down Hitachi models from Travelstar 80GN and 40GN families that Hitachi took over from IBM. The same is true for Toshiba MK8025GAS. Of course, they had not a single chance to fly high in the rankings. Hitachi 40GN found itself in the very end of the race more often, though. Well, it has the smallest buffer (2MB) plus low data density. Together with 4,200rpm spindle rotation speed, this resulted in the slowest read and write speeds and an overall poorer performance. Toshiba MK8025GAS was just a little better than that; it worked wonders at reading and writing small data blocks, but sometimes would lose to Hitachi 40GN.

I think we won’t have to wait for long until the manufacturers of 2.5” HDDs switch to models with 5,400 and 7,200rpm speeds and 80MB and higher storage capacities. There are all necessary prerequisites for that. Moreover, 2.5” drives need to improve their characteristics, since their application field is constantly growing.

We are glad to introduce to you the first 2.5” hard disk drive with 7,200rpm spindle rotation speed. This solution from Hitachi should indicate the beginning of a new stage in the HDD market. Besides setting a new standard for notebooks, low-profile 2.5” “mobile” drives with “desktop” speed are about to start their invasion into the SFF systems.