The Toshiba name has been a synonym for quality and reliability. The MK1032GAX HDD with its increased capacity of 100GB, makes it a great solution for notebooks or portable devices. Moreover, it is among the fastest 2.5" hard disk drives on the market, with a rotation speed of 5400rpm and 12ms average seek time. The 16MB buffer is promises great performance while the 300,000 Hours MTTF, guarantees that this hard disk is going to last for a long time.

Our primary aim was to see the difference in performance between the Toshiba and another recent 2.5" hard disk drive, one with an equally large capacity, the Fujitsu MHT2100AH with 80GB of storage, 8MB buffer and rotation speed of 4200rpm. According to our tests, the Toshiba HDD was faster in some benchmarks while in others, the Fujitsu was better. PCMark showed that the Toshiba HDD seems to be better during XP Startup, Application Loading and General Usage while the Fujitsu was better during Virus Scans and File Writes. All in all, the Toshiba MK1032GAX did not impress as much as we had expected considering its higher rotational speed and larger buffer.

At the time of this review, the price for the Toshiba MK1032GAX on the e-market was around US$175 ( newegg.com) while for the Fujitsu MHT2080AT US$101. The Toshiba has larger capacity and better specifications but this does not warrant the huge price difference. Fujitsu also offers HDDs at 100GB with 8MB buffer at 4200rpm (MHT2100AT) for US$145 and the MHT2100AH with 100GB capacity, 16MB buffer at 5400rpm for US$155. The final decision is yours...