20. Conclusion: The Fastest Spindle Speed Wins!

Due to its technical advantage in spindle speed, it was pretty obvious which drive would win in the benchmarks: Hitachi's TravelStar 7K60. It is the only notebook hard drive that runs at 7,200 RPM, and thus easily outperforms all the other drives out there. This product gets our Editor's Choice award.

In the 5,400 RPM class, several drives fight fiercely for top spot, and the winner is usually determined by the type of applications you will be running. Toshiba's MK8026GAX offers great transfer rates, but despite its 16 MB cache, fails to beat Seagate and Western Digital in the application benchmarks.

Samsung's 80 GB drive MP0804H went through the benchmark suite without attracting much attention. Performance was in the middle of the pack, but slightly behind Seagate and WD. But the Samsung drive should be available at lower prices, making it a nice deal.

One issue with Fujitsu is that we found it had a warranty length of only one year. We consider that insufficient for a new and rather huge drive (100 GB). A three-year warranty is standard with most other drives, except for Seagate's Momentus 5400.2, which comes with a commendable five-year warranty. In addition, the new Momentus has no noteworthy disadvantages, and is the only drive that manages to offer both a fast spindle speed of 5,400 RPM and a maximum capacity of 100 GB.

Western Digital was able to launch the Scorpio drive successfully. Although it is their first product in the notebook drive category, it managed to score good I/O and application benchmark results. How about adding a 7,200 RPM drive as well?