Product Reviews

If your notebook hard disk is feeling the strain, an upgrade is usually surprisingly easy, and may be the ticket to giving your laptop a new lease of life.

The 7K100 has a miniature parallel ATA connection, which supplies both data and power to the disk, and inside the disk are two platters, accessed by four heads. Not only is 100GB the largest capacity you'll currently find in notebook drives, but there's also the 7,200rpm spindle speed, which makes the 7K100 the fastest spinning notebook hard disk currently available, along with Seagate's Momentus 7200.1.

The issue, though, is whether it's worth the extra cash over its 5,400rpm relative, the 5K100, which Insight is selling for £94 (£110 inc VAT). Our technical tests, run with HD Tach, revealed the 7K100

But our real-world tests showed the lack of meaningful distinction between the two. We wrote 100MB of medium files (between 800KB and 1MB) to the 5K100 in 8.5 seconds, a transfer rate of 11.9MB/sec. The 7K100 did the same test at a transfer rate of 13.8MB/sec. Reading the same files from our test disks and writing them onto a secondary disk revealed virtually identical transfer rates - 11.1MB/sec for the 5K100 and 11.2MB/sec for the 7K100.

Our real-world benchmarks are the best indication of application performance, though. Running our tests on the same laptop and interchanging the cloned disks produced a score of 0.88 for the 5K100, and 0.89 for the 7K100 - a speed increase of 1 per cent. There's also a slight battery-life penalty to pay - the 5K100 draws just 0.85W when idle, compared to the 1.1W drawn by the 7K100.

The 7K100 is clearly faster for sustained disk operations. However, even in intensive application use, the performance benefits you'll see for your extra £30 are very small indeed.