MaximumPC 2007 H

W

e pit the highest-capacity note-

book hard drive against the fast-

est notebook hard drive; then we

throw both into a steel cage with what may

very well be the fastest solid state drive on

Earth. The results will shock you!

—Gordon Mah UnG

Mtron MSd-S25032

An early 16GB SATA solid-state drive from

Mtron wowed us, but that was just the

beginning. The company’s 32GB version of

the drive slays all other contenders for the

speed crown.

How fast is this bad boy? We put it up

against a desktop Western Digital 150GB

10,000rpm Raptor for reference, and the

32GB Mtron MSD-S25032 flat-out smoked

it. In fact, the only reason the MSD-S25032

isn’t the fastest hard drive we’ve ever

tested is because it’s not a hard drive—it’s

a solid-state drive.

So it goes without saying that the other

two drives reviewed here, the Seagate

Momentus and the Western Digital Scorpio,

had no chance of touch-

ing the Mtron’s benchmark

scores. You can read the

scores for yourself and

weep for disk-based stor-

age. Average read speeds

of 138MB/s—equivalent to

those of a striped RAID—and

a .1-second access time put

hard drives to shame.

The access time is no

surprise, as this drive stores

data in nonvolatile flash RAM

instead of the magnetic plat-

ters of a hard drive. This

greatly improves reliability

since there are no moving

parts to crash, no bearings to

wear out, and no delay while

waiting for the head to seek.

To test the drive’s durability,

we repeatedly pounded it on

a lab bench while we ran our benchmarks.

That treatment would kill most hard drives,

but the Mtron shrugged it off without even

a performance dip.

In HD Tach, the Mtron’s average

read speeds of 138MB/s blazed past the

48MB/s achieved by the fastest notebook

drive we’ve tested, Seagate’s Momentus

7200.2. Even the desktop 10,000rpm

Raptor (reviewed March 2006) can achieve

only 92MB/s average read speeds. The

MSD-S25032 produced similar results

with HD Tune, achieving read speeds of

121MB/s.

We also used PCMark05’s hard-drive

suite to judge real-world workloads.

PCMark05 uses trace patterns to simu-

late the read and write loads that a drive

goes through when booting Windows XP

or starting Microsoft Word, the Mozilla

browser, Acrobat Reader 5, or virus scan

workloads. The MSD-S25032 crushed all

other hard drives in these tests. We saw a

healthy boost in our Photoshop CS2 test,

as well, but no major gains in hibernation

time or XP boot times. Perhaps the bottle-

neck is the OS?

Unless our benchmarks are lying to us,

the MSD-S25032 is the fastest notebook

drive available, achieving near RAID 0 per-

formance with a single drive.

Despite the amazing performance,

there’s an obvious shortcoming. Let’s

face it, 32GB isn’t much capacity today.

And the speed comes at an exorbitant

price. The MSD-S25032 costs a whopping

$2,000. (We’re told by the U.S. distributor

of the drive, DVNation.com, that it should

be in the $1,000 range very soon.)

Still, for those who need amazing

durability and speed, the MSD-S25032 is a

winner. Despite the sticker shock, with this

kind of performance, we have no choice

but to award Mtron’s MSD-S25032 high

honors.

Notebook Drive

Throwdown

Solid state vs. spinning platters: What tech will win this grudge match?

Meet the Mtron MSd-S25032, aka the

fastest notebook drive on the planet.

reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

84 MAXIMUMPC holiday 2007

data pack rats, rejoice! Western digital’s Scorpio fits

250GB into a notebook hd.

$2,000, http://www.dvnation.com

mtron msd-s25032

rocky erickSon

By far, the best perfor-

mance in a notebook drive;

nothing to break.

rocky road^9

Room for only the OS and

one Blu-ray rip. MAXIMUMPC

KICKASS