Toshiba's 200GB 2.5" Drive Is a Winner

That until Hitachi's 250GB monster comes to play. As the drive is not available yet, Toshiba can remain calm, at least for the moment. The 200GB drive is indeed a winner, especially for those who want a fair amount of storage space that they can carry around with them. This particular drive has been around for almost six months now and although it is not the best seller, it remains on top of the list when laptop manufacturers decide to integrate a large hard drive into their products.

The drive looks like your usual 2.5" laptop drive but is somewhat lighter than usual, weighting 98grams. The 2 platters spin at 4200rpm but combined with the 4 heads it turns out to be quite an impressive piece of engineering. It has an 8MB buffer and uses an ATA-7 interface (which is in fact a standard S-ATA interface so don't let the name fool you). Besides the fact that it works on any modern laptop, the drive can also be connected to a desktop S-ATA interface but you are advised to use a 3.5" drive in such a case.

Performance wise, the Burst Speed registered with HDTach is around 76.9MB/s (maybe other products could do better but it's not the burst speed that counts) 24.5MB/s. The notebook drive has a random access time of almost 19.6ms, with an estimated average read of 33.6MB/s utilizing only about 2% of the CPU. I'd say the average read performance puts it in the lead of 2.5" 4200rpm drives.

The S-ATA interface shines when copying large files. And it's here where the large drive really proves its capabilities. I'd strongly advise you to buy one but only if you need the space and if your laptop has an internal ATA7 interface.