In order to test the Toshiba MK1032GAX, as well as the comparison HDD from Fujitsu, we used Teac's external USB2.0 case.

HD Tach tests the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of your attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive, etc). All drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, 1394, USB, SATA and RAID are supported. Test results from HD Tach can be used to confirm manufacturer specs, analyze systems for proper performance as well as allow you to compare performance with others.

This benchmark is intended to determine the maximum read or write speed of the device at various locations. Hard drives, for example, have faster read/write speeds at the inside edge (mapped to block 0) of the device, so it is useful to see the difference in speed. The maximum sustained speed (lowest speed on the device) is an important metric for real time sequential access applications. The maximum speed may be important to a power user that would like to partition the drive into a high speed partition and low speed partition.

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The performance of the Toshiba hard disk was better than the Fujitsu, in both reading and writing, as reported by HD-Tach. Toshiba has an average reading speed of 28.2MB/s while the Fujitsu 23.1MB/s. In writing however, there is a huge difference between the two drives. The Fujitsu drive reported a rather low average writing transfer rate of 0.4MB/s while the Toshiba 32MB/s. In order to be 100% sure, we repeated the test with the Fujitsu three times, even on different motherboards.