This is a 160GB laptop hard drive taken from a relatively low-end laptop or netbook, if memory serves me correctly. The 5400RPM spindle speed leads to slower performance, but these were by far very common amongst laptops for their reduced power consumption and heat generation.
The Drive
This drive is a 3rd generation 5400RPM Momentus laptop drive, model ST9160821AS with firmware 3.ALB. The drive is Made in China and is dated from 2007.
The drive is packed to optimise use of the volume. The PCB has components concealed on the reverse side, and the cast “tub” of the drive has a barcode and datamatrix label on it as was customary for Seagate laptop drives.
This drive has a standard 9.5mm height.
It also has the standard serial number label on the opposite face to the SATA connection, this one had a pale green colour square.
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
The drive is relatively young at 5516 hours, but has already exhausted its load/unload cycle count with 239100 cycles at the time of the screenshot. The drive claims to have an 8MB cache buffer and is connected via the original SATA 1.5Gbit/s standard.
HD Tune
The drive achieved a sequential read speed ranging from 44.8MB/s down to 22.4MB/s, averaging 35.4MB/s which is a rate quite similar to USB 2.0 making this quite a slow-feeling drive to use. Access time averaged 16.1ms.
Write speeds are pretty similar, registering 44.7MB/s down to 22.4MB/s, averaging 35.2MB/s with an access time of 9.98ms (likely due to caching).
Peak IOPS reached 63 for read and 106 for writes which is fairly normal.
Cache benefits were visible for both reads and writes, although the effective cache capacity seems rather limited.
Full throughput was achieved by 8kB accesses.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark reports a sequential read of 46.82MB/s and sequential write of 46.51MB/s. Medium-block accesses achieved 26.07MB/s and 26.75MB/s respectively. Queued small-block accesses reached 0.859MB/s and 0.605MB/s which is noticeably less than the desktop counterparts.
ATTO
The full performance is reached by 4kB accesses, representing excellent smaller block I/O behaviour.