3. Fujitsu MHU2100AT - 100 GB

Fujitsu's largest hard drive has now hit 100 GB. As this is the first hard drive of that capacity, Fujitsu decided to stick to 4,200 RPM speeds. Due to the conservative spindle speed, the MHU2100AT is practically inaudible when installed into a notebook. At 99.8 g (3.5 oz) the new top model has the same weight as its 80 GB predecessor.

Data transfer rates between 31 and 16 MB/s make pretty clear that the storage density of this drive must be considerably higher than that of its direct competitors, the Toshiba MK1031GAS and Hitachi 4K80. The minimum transfer rate was quite impressive, in particular. When taking a look at access times, the Fujitsu drive is one of the slowest models. Yet that does not have too much impact on the application benchmark Winbench 99 2.0, since the MHU2100AT scores average results here.