If you want to max out the storage on your laptop, look to the 1TB Toshiba MK1059GSM, a 2.5in notebook SATA drive with 1000GB capacity
In the desktop PC realm, we can now find 3 terabyte (TB) of storage in one single hard disk. But 3.5in Serial ATA hard disks do not fit into notebooks, so laptop users must make do with the best that the smaller form-factor 2.5in HDD can provide.
If you can accomodate the slightly fatter 12.5mm-thick version of the 2.5in drive, the highest capacity disk on the market in early 2011 now reaches 1TB. That’s an extraordinary amount of data to squeeze into such a small shape.
The Toshiba MK1059GSM is the company’s largest notebook drive, firmly ticking the 1TB box.
It’s a 5400rpm hard disk with three platters, sporting a 3Gb/s SATA interface, and takes the new Advanced Sector Format technology that we see on the the largest 3TB desktop drives, with a 4kB-per-sector configuration.
Modern operating systems can take this in their stride; but if you’re using obsolete Microsoft OSes like Windows XP, you could be in trouble.
Sound performance
Toshiba has managed to keep noise levels very low, quoting 25dB for both idle and seek acoustics. And in our tests, we found it to be subjectively very quiet indeed, with minimal frame vibration.
Read and write performance are in line with a modern 5400rpm notebook drive.
We measured read speeds of up to 98.5MB/s (with 512kB transfer files) in the ATTO Disk Benchmark test; and write speeds up to 98.9MB/s (also 512kB). Relatively level peak performance was seen at all transfer sizes from 64kB to 8192kB.
Small files transferred slower, as expected: 4kB, for example, peaked at 45 and 41MB/s for reads and writes.
Crystal Disk Mark broadly concurred in its measurement of peak performances, returning sequential read/write speeds of 99.3 and 98.0MB/s.
Using HD Tune Pro, we were able to see how performance changes across the disk platter.
This benchmark tool gave lower average figures: 76.3MB/s read, and 74.1MB/s. Access time is a slightly high 20ms.
A glance at the graph of performance versus capacity gives the classic drop in speed as you approach the centre of the disk platters, caused by lower angular velocity.
Toshiba MK1059GSM read performance, as measured in HD Tune Pro 4.60
Toshiba MK1059GSM read performance, as measured in HD Tune Pro 4.60
So while a fresh disk can hit around 98MB/s reads and 91MB/s writes, by the time the disk is nearly full, read/write speed will roughly halve to just 48MB/s. This variation could be mitigated by use in a RAID array.
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