Results: Transfer Diagrams
There is not much to say: the Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 starts at 80 MB/s, and still provides 40 MB/s when you fill the entire drive with data (which forces the use of the inner sectors, which rotate at slower absolute speed).
The Spinpoint MP2 provides slightly higher transfer rates than the Hitachi drive, but it shows noticeable spikes. If you have to rely on certain transfer rates, make sure that you only look at the lowest transfer speeds.
This is the throughput winner: Seagate’s Momentus 7200.3 provides almost 90 MB/s read and write transfer rate, and it stays well below 40 MB/s at the end of the medium.
The new Scorpio Black is slightly slower than the Momentus 7200.3, but it drew a beautiful diagram. Performance is at a level where 3.5” desktop drives were only two years ago.
There is an apparent error on page 16. You state, "The WD Scorpio Black and Seagate’s Momentus 7200.3 do very well here.... they both require less than 0.8 W idle power." However, the bar to which you refer on the last chart entitled, "Lowest Drive Idle Power Requirement: Windows Vista without Drive Power Savings," is labeled as "Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS, 250GB, 5400RPM, SATA 150." The bar which is labeled "Western Digital Scorpio WD3200BEKT, 320GB, 7200RPM, SATA 300," shows an idle power of 0.97 W. Either the bars are mislabeled or you accidentally looked at the wrong data for the WD Scorpio Black when writing your paragraph summary. I would like to know which is correct. Otherwise, this was a great article.
Can we get the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB drive compared as well? I was just about to purchase a new drive when I saw that fella. Would be great to know how it shapes up compared to the 7200.3 and the Scorpio Black.