Hard Disk Test Comparison and Features
The MTRON MSD-SATA6025-032 features a capacity of 32GB with sizes ranging from 4GB to 32GB in the 2.5" form factor and up to 128GB in the 3.5" form factor. The 32GB drive sells for approximately $1499 in the US, although pricing in the Asian markets have dropped below $1000 now. We will go into more detail about the Seagate and Samsung drives in our 2.5" drive roundup.
Briefly, our Samsung HM16HJI drive is the first available Hybrid drive in the notebook market and features a 256MB NAND flash buffer that is utilized as a ReadyDrive device in Vista. The Seagate Momentus is one of the faster pure mechanical 2.5" hard drives in the market today. We say one of the faster as early testing with the new Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 indicates that Seagate has some catching up to do from a performance viewpoint now.
Our thermal, acoustic, and power numbers are based upon actual readings in our AMD/NVIDIA based Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv9000z testbed. We still have several additional tests to generate with an Intel based platform and will report those results in a future article.
Hardware Setup
The notebook test bed we are utilizing today features the Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv9000z that features the AMD Turin X2 TL-60 CPU running at 2.0GHz. We are utilizing a 4GB memory configuration that is now standard in our test beds. The system is equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 GPU that includes the nForce Go 430 chipset logic. Our desktop resolutions are set to 1440x900 with our gaming tests run at 1024x768 resolutions with Medium Quality settings. Windows Vista Home Premium is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each platform to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The review drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results for the individual test results. The high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the latest drivers and BIOS available from the manufacturer to ensure consistency in our playback results. The Windows Vista swap file is set to a static 2048MB and we clean the prefetch folder after each benchmark run. Battery life tests will be available in the 2.5" drive roundup.
| Hard Drive Specifications | |||
| MTRON SSD 32GB MSD-SATA6025 |
Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB ST9160823ASG |
Samsung MH80 FlashON 160GB HM16HJI |
|
| Manufacturer's Stated Capacity | 32 GB | 160 GB | 160 GB |
| Operating System Stated Capacity | 30.9 GB | 149.05 GB | 149.05 GB |
| Interface | SATA 1.5Gb/s | SATA 3Gb/s | SATA 1.5Gb/s |
| Rotational Speed | n/a | 7,200 RPM | 5,400 RPM |
| Cache Size | n/a | 8 MB | 8 MB DRAM Buffer, 256 MB oneNAND Flash buffer |
| Read Seek Time | .1 ms | 14.1 ms | 18.9 ms |
| Number of Heads | n/a | 4 | 4 |
| Number of Platters | n/a | 2 | 2 |
| Power Draw Idle / Load | .15W / .55W | .87W / 2.89W | .85W / 2.27W |
| Acoustics Idle / Load | 0 dB(A) / 0 dB(A) | 27 dB(A) / 33 dB(A) | 26 dB(A) / 30 dB(A) |
| Thermals Idle / Load | 29C / 31C | 33C / 39C | 33C / 37C |
| Write/Erase Endurance | >140 years at 50GB Write/Erase Cycles per Day |
- | - |
| Data Retention | 10 years | - | - |
| Command Queuing | n/a | Native Command Queuing | Native Command Queuing |
| Warranty | 5 Years | 5 Years | 3 Years |
The MTRON MSD-SATA6025-032 features a capacity of 32GB with sizes ranging from 4GB to 32GB in the 2.5" form factor and up to 128GB in the 3.5" form factor. The 32GB drive sells for approximately $1499 in the US, although pricing in the Asian markets have dropped below $1000 now. We will go into more detail about the Seagate and Samsung drives in our 2.5" drive roundup.
Briefly, our Samsung HM16HJI drive is the first available Hybrid drive in the notebook market and features a 256MB NAND flash buffer that is utilized as a ReadyDrive device in Vista. The Seagate Momentus is one of the faster pure mechanical 2.5" hard drives in the market today. We say one of the faster as early testing with the new Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 indicates that Seagate has some catching up to do from a performance viewpoint now.
Our thermal, acoustic, and power numbers are based upon actual readings in our AMD/NVIDIA based Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv9000z testbed. We still have several additional tests to generate with an Intel based platform and will report those results in a future article.
Hardware Setup
| HP Pavilion dv9000z Laptop Storage Test Bed |
|
| Processor | AMD Turin X2 - TL-60 (2.0GHz Dual Core) |
| Chipset | NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 / nForce 430 |
| RAM | 2 x 2GB PC2-5300 Settings: DDR2-667 - 5-5-5-18 |
| OS Hard Drive | 1 x Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB |
| System Platform Drivers | NVIDIA 5.53a |
| Video Card | 1 x GeForce G0 6150 |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA ForceWare 7.15.10.9815 |
| Optical Drive | SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-R/RW |
| Display | 17" WVGA+ HD-Ultra |
| Operating System | Vista Home Premium - 32-bit |
The notebook test bed we are utilizing today features the Hewlett Packard Pavilion dv9000z that features the AMD Turin X2 TL-60 CPU running at 2.0GHz. We are utilizing a 4GB memory configuration that is now standard in our test beds. The system is equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 GPU that includes the nForce Go 430 chipset logic. Our desktop resolutions are set to 1440x900 with our gaming tests run at 1024x768 resolutions with Medium Quality settings. Windows Vista Home Premium is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each platform to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The review drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results for the individual test results. The high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the latest drivers and BIOS available from the manufacturer to ensure consistency in our playback results. The Windows Vista swap file is set to a static 2048MB and we clean the prefetch folder after each benchmark run. Battery life tests will be available in the 2.5" drive roundup.
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kmmatney - Friday, August 17, 2007 - link
I'd like to see these same tests on a drive after a few months of use, and lots of file fragmentation. it looks like all the Hybrid drives really improve is windows standby time - actual application performance seemed a bit porr for the hybrid drive.brundlefly - Sunday, August 19, 2007 - link
File fragmentation is less of an issue on the hybrid then a mechanical.It has no impact on access time, however if you are massively fragmented sequential read time will suffer - but again its much worse on the mechanical.
Again this needs to be drilled in - assuming a hybrid hard drive of the mtron's specs or better, there is no advantage to a mechanical hard drive except price and storage size.
Now that we have the mtron, the performance gap is only going to get bigger, the storage sizes larger, and the prices lower.
puffpio - Friday, August 17, 2007 - link
I'm eagerly looking forward to a full notebook tests (the most important being its effect on battery life)legoman666 - Friday, August 17, 2007 - link
Indeed, so am I. It will be interesting to see how it effects battery life while idle and also when it's doing stuff.Spoelie - Sunday, August 19, 2007 - link
In idle the difference is half a watt.. That's within normal variance of electronic components.Unless you will be using the hard disk very intensively for the entire battery charge (in which the HDD will consume an entire 2 watts more..) you won't notice any difference in battery life.