Before the IBM Travelstar name was sold to Hitachi, their drives were rather uninspiring-looking.
The Drive
This particular drive came from an old laptop, where it was stained pink by something inside the laptop. Made in the Philippines, this is a 20GB IDE drive with a 9.5mm height.
A green PCB adorns the rear. with some labels.
Two labels are affixed to the sides of the drive, but on different sides, unlike later IBM/Hitachi convention.
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
It seems only to have very few hours on it, and is rather healthy-looking. The firmware is 00H1A0A3 with a 2MB cache, none of which is taken by the onboard controller.
HD Tune
Writes are a bit jittery, but the reads imply a performance of 17.2MB/s on average for sequential accesses may have been the original performance level. The limited transfer rate is not surprising as the drive has a 4200RPM spindle speed.
Random access performance is not particularly inspiring, which is no surprise given the drive’s throughput and spindle speed. The cache does have an effect on the performance.
CrystalDiskMark
The CDM performance shows just why laptops of the era are often a bit slow-feeling.
ATTO
Full read performance is achieved by 4kB, with writes peaking at 16kB.