Toshiba MQ01ABD100 review

Mechanical hard disks are often overshadowed by faster, flashier SSDs, but they have their advantages – chiefly much higher capacities and better-value storage, as this £103 1TB Toshiba 2.5in disk demonstrates.

2.5in hard disks in capacities this large are fairly rare, and are ideal for laptop users who want to upgrade to more space. The disk is a similar price to 1TB models from Western Digital and Seagate, and far cheaper than an SSD for its capacity; Toshiba’s disk comes in at 10p-per-gigabyte, compared to the £1 plus of SSDs.

You pay a price in performance for the higher capacity, though. Mechanical hard disks are inevitably slower than SSDs, and this 2.5in model also suffers from the slower platter speed of 5,400rpm – desktop drives usually spin at 7,200rpm. The Toshiba disk wrote large files at 67MB/s and read them at 104MB/s – so was around 7MB/s slower writing large files than Western Digital’s Scorpio Blue 1TB disk, if slightly quicker reading them.

Its small file performance was poor. It read files at 39MB/s, which is a huge 31MB/s slower than Western Digital’s disk, and a write speed of 16MB/s is very slow and 11MB/s slower than Western Digital’s Scorpio Blue.

Toshiba’s 1TB laptop disk offers plenty of space for your files, but it’s a slow disk. The Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB is currently £90 from www.scan.co.uk and is much faster.