Review: Toshiba MK1059GSM 1TB

Are you after frankly ludicrous storage capacity in a teeny-weeny form-factor? You want the new Toshiba 1TB 2.5-inch laptop drive then, don't you?

When politicians come out with that hackneyed old saying "you've never had it so good", they usually get slated from pillar to post and then resign, but when it comes to the cost and capacity of standard mechanical hard drives there's really no arguing against it.

Could you have ever imagined a 1TB notebook hard drive and it costing less than a hundred quid? Less than a couple of years ago that was the price of a 320GB drive.

Fresh from launching a couple of 750GB notebook drives recently, Toshiba has upped the ante once again with the MK1059GSM, a 1TB 2.5-inch drive.

You might well wonder what the need is for such large capacity drives in a notebook. The answer lies in the amount of multimedia notebooks on the market. You only have to start downloading and storing large amounts of HD media and even a 1TB drive begins to look a little inadequate.

Benchmarks

HD Tach Burst Speed (MB/s: Bigger is better)

Toshiba MK7559GSXP: 202
WD WD3200 Scorpio Black: 130
Toshiba MK1059GSM: 129

HD Tach Random Access (Milliseconds: Lower is better)

WD WD3200 Scorpio Black: 14.7
Toshiba MK7559GSXP: 17.2
Toshiba MK1059GSM: 18.5

Both the MK7559GSXP and the MK1059GSM share the same latest disk drive technologies, rather than the previous generation that the WD drive uses, but the twin-platter MK7559GSXP outperforms the MK1059GSM because the larger drive uses a three-disc design.

Toshiba's MK1059GSM and MK7559GSXP both lose out to WD's Scorpio Black in the random access results due to their slower 5,400rpm spin speed's. WD's drive spins at a much faster 7,200rpm and has a massive16MB buffer.

As with the 750GB MK7559GSXP we looked at recently, the 1TB MK1059GSM uses the latest Advanced Sector Formatting (ASF) technology to make the most of any available storage space.

ASF technology uses a 4K byte per sector which results in the removal of the Sync/DAM blocks of the legacy 512 byte per sector format and as a result closes the gaps between sectors therefore giving a greater storage capacity for a given platter size through increased areal density.

ASF also brings with it improved ECC (Error Correcting Code), leading to better formatting efficiency and data integrity.

The MK1059GSM also comes with Toshiba's Silent Seek technology which aims to keep the drive as quiet as it is in idle when it performs seek operations – handy if you're watching a film on your notebook and don't want to suffer from the noise of a chattering hard drive during the quieter moments.

As with the MK7559GSXP, Toshiba has given the MK1059GSM a relatively slow spindle speed of 5,400rpm and a small 8MB cache (buffer), but since it's aimed at the mainstream, rather than performance, market this is perfectly understandable.

A quick word of warning before you rush out to get one of these drives, though, because of the three platter (disc) design, the drive is a 12.5mm high design, not the more common 9.5mm design, so it's not one for your nice thin and light notebooks – it's more for your chunkier desktop replacement/mobile workstations. Always check to see how much drive bay room you have before you buy.

We liked

Huge capacity combined with a ridiculously low price tag make the MK1059GSM a very desirable upgrade for a multimedia notebook or a mobile workstation.

It would also make an interesting choice for a low-profile media centre, or you could connect two or more in a mini RAID array in a standard desktop PC.

We disliked

It would have been good to see a faster spin speed or even a larger cache, but since it's aimed at the mainstream market, it's understandable. Regrettable but understandable.

It's not really a dislike, but because of its higher profile you need to make sure you have room in your notebook drive bay to fit it in.