Testing (continued):

Temperature:

The larger Seagate drive ran cooler here, but very close to the Hitachi drive. In a tight, closed system like a laptop or a micro computer (a la Mac Mini), you don't need any extra heat affecting system stability and life span. Even though most 2.5" drives are rated for up to 60 degrees Celsius, it's good to see they stay cool under the stress of tons of read and writes.



File Transfer:

Finally we compare how these drives bench based on real world stuff - how fast can I move files around? In our testing, we used a USB 2.0 thumb drive and a 445 MB folder with 762 files inside. In the write test, access time was part of the key here, and the older SATA I Hitachi just couldn't hang. The read test is a bit more confusing. While the denser Momentus 5400.6 can access data faster from the platter, the USB bus may be the bottleneck. Although given the length of the test, the 3 drives are not off by very much.