Comparing quality/performance of 2 Hard Drives

Heya all,

I have a laptop replacement that was sent out to me, because of a CPU issue (the original laptop is only a month old). The two laptops have different brand hard drives, and they have given me the option of keeping the original hard drive or keeping the one that came in the replacement. They both spec out pretty much the same, and I'm wondering from the people who have experience with either/both drives, their feedback.

The two drives are:
Fujitsu MHT2080AH
Toshiba MK8026GAX

Specs on both are:
80GB
5400rpm
ATA-100
12ms access

Let me know if you have good positive or negative info on these drives, or if you have seen them performance rated (against each other) somewhere.


Cheers,

Stevo

zv5000z: Ath64_3200+ (2.0GHz) - 1GB DDR - 80GB 5400rpm - 64MB GeForce4 440 - 15.0" XGA, harman/kardon speakers

 

I'm going to guess that your Toshiba drive is the 80GB equivalent of this one:

http://www.sdd.toshiba.com/cda/main.aspx?Path=/818200000007000000010000659800001516/81820000011d000000010000659c000003fd/8182000001c8000000010000659c00000599/8182000001e5000000010000659c000005cb/8182000008d7000000010000659c00001d14

In which case it has a 16MB buffer and has been rated highly. The Fujitsu:

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/storage/hdd/mhdd/mht20ahxx-catalog.html

has a more common 8MB cache. I'd lean heavily towards keeping the Toshiba.

 

Do you think the extra buffer difference between 8mb and 16mb will give any noticeable performance difference?


Cheers,

Stevo

zv5000z: Ath64_3200+ (2.0GHz) - 1GB DDR - 80GB 5400rpm - 64MB GeForce4 440 - 15.0" XGA, harman/kardon speakers

 

Hi Stevo,
I have no experience with either drive and since I work for Maxtor, I'll give you my unbiased opinion after reading the specs on both drives. I did use to work for Fujitsu in the R&D of their 1st notebook drives, but that was a long time ago and they have since laid off all the people here in the USA that showed them how to make drives, so I'm not partial to Fujitsu either.
The Toshiba has a 16MB buffer and usually that will mean better performance since extra data can be stored in the buffer. However it is not a given that a Toshiba with 16MB buffer is higher performance than another manufacturers drive with 8MB of buffer. For that you need to find a website that has benchmarked them. This is because the firmware/code is the one of the biggest factors in performance and many times a drive with lousy performance will be given a bigger buffer to help out with performance rather than taking the firmware effort to fix things the right way. Also the bigger buffer will only help you out if the data you need is in it, and that will only happen if all the data you need is stored sequencially and many times it is not. So I would say the 16MB buffer of the Toshiba is only a very small plus for that drive until there are benchmarks comparing it to the Fujitsu. The 16 MB buffer will usually add to the power consumption of the drive, is that important to you?
I read the power spec for these drives and while doing read/write operations the power is 2.5 watts for the Toshiba and 2.3 watts for the Fujitsu(very close, but the fujitsu is better)but drives spend most of their operating time in idle mode (after reading or writing and before going into standby mode) For idle mode power the difference is pretty great; the Toshiba using 1.05w vs the fujitus's .85w, that's a 23.5% power increase over the Fujitsu. Standby and sleep modes are the same for both drives. So I'm estimating that the overall increase in power drain by the Toshiba will be around 18-20% more than the Fujitsu. The hard drive is not the only power drain on your notebook, probably #3 behind the LCD and CPU so the overall decrease in battery life by using the Toshiba drive would probably be in the 3-5% range for a Pentium M based notebook and probably only a percent or two for a P4 or AMD based notebook. Pretty much all the other specs were the same. I tried to find info on the noise emissions from these drives but could not find any detailed spec on them, both drives have fluid dynamic bearings so they should be nearly the same and very quiet.

So in summary if your the kind of person who runs on battery power quite a bit and looking for all the extra battery life you can get, go with the Fujitsu. If battery life does'nt matter to you, then look around and see if you can find some benchmark results for these drives and if the Toshiba has higher benchmarks, go with it instead.

good luck
Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill