Toshiba MK7559GSXP review

The Toshiba MK7559GSXP isn’t the first 750GB laptop hard disk we’ve seen. It is, however, the cheapest at £75, which equates to 10p per gigabyte. It has a SATA II interface and is 9.5mm thick, so will fit in almost all laptops made in the past few years.

Like the majority of 2.5in SATA laptop hard disks, it has a spindle speed of 5,400rpm. Although models with faster 7,200rpm speeds are available, we’re generally not convinced the speed gains are worth the added expense for most laptop users.

We were a little disappointed to find that the performance of the MK7559GSXP in our file transfer tests was inconsistent. It was fast at reading files, but quite slow at writing them. Large files were read quickly at 80.2MB/s, but written at just 32.1MB/s. Small files were read at a reasonably quick 31MB/s, but write speeds were very sluggish at 14.9MB/s.

Our test laptop didn’t see any increase in battery life when fitted with the MK7559GSXP instead of its stock hard disk. Although this may seem initially disappointing, at least it didn’t decrease battery life like other 2.5in hard disks we’ve seen.

The MK7559GSXP is the cheapest 750GB laptop hard disk we’ve seen yet, but not by much – it’s only a few pounds cheaper than the Western Digital 750GB Scorpio Blue. The Scorpio has faster overall performance, making it the better buy if you want lots of laptop storage.