Test Setup

Since this is a 2.5-inch mobile hard drive, the tests would have to be conducted differently although most of the performance tests would still be similar to desktop drives. To test the drive's power consumption, we installed the drive into a Samsung NX10 (Centrino) notebook and benchmarked the performance and battery life of the system with MobileMark 2002. The results will indicate just how much more speed you can stand to achieve with the hard drive under normal office applications on the notebook. The battery life test will be a good indication of how much more power is drawn by the Travelstar 7K60.

In order to give the tests more meaning, we also tested three other drives so that there's a base for comparison. In the following sections, you'll also find results for the following hard drive models :-

Hitachi Travelstar DK23EA-40 (40GB, 4200RPM, 2MB)

Hitachi Travelstar DK23EB-20 (20GB, 5400RPM, 2MB)

Fujitsu MHS2030AT (30GB, 4200RPM, 2MB)

Since heat is a major concern for 2.5-inch hard disk drives used in mobile applications, we also tested the operating temperature of the drives to see if the Travelstar 7K60 is at all hotter than most 4200RPM and 5400RPM drives in the market. In the tests, we installed the hard drive in a small Apricorn 2.5-inch external USB 2.0 plastic enclosure which does not come with any form of active cooling. Such enclosures are commonly found in the market and the test should be a good measuring yardstick of the drive's performance in such tiny enclosures (including a typical notebook). A thermal probe is attached to the underside of the drive, directly on the drive's motor. The temperature of the drive is monitored and taken after 15 minutes of rigorous seek activity simulated using IOmeter's default workload.

We used this Apricorn 2.5-inch hard disk drive enclosure to test the drive's operating temperature.