Toshiba MK1059GSM 1TB review

A terabyte of laptop storage for under £100? Are you serious?

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Toshiba MK1059GSM
The Toshiba MK1059GSM fits a lot of data into not a lot of space

TechRadar Verdict

While it may not be the storage solution for the thin and light notebook market, its amazingly low price makes it an interesting solution for a number of platforms, not necessarily all laptop-based.

Pros

  • +

    Large capacity

  • +

    Low price

Cons

  • -

    Slow spindle speed

  • -

    Not for the thinner notebook

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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.

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