Fujitsu kept pushing the envelope with the MPE-series superseding the MPD-series, again offering higher performance and larger capacities.
The Drive
Like previous models, the drive is made in Thailand, however is now in a shiny-top cover rather than the two-tone of the past. The MPE-series capacities range from 6.48GB through to 27.32GB, making this the smallest capacity drive in the series.
The PCB has shrunk further, with the flexible flat cable to the head assembly now covered by a metal shield for protection and shielding.
The structure of the shell seems consistent with the former drives, although a new label reminding users of the IDE cable direction has been added.
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
The drive supports SMART, has a firmware revision of ED-03-08 and a cache of 512KB. Unfortunately, it seems the power-on hours count is incorrect, registering just one hour which is implausible. Otherwise, the drive does appear to report healthy vital signs.
HD Tune
The drive averages a read speed of 16MB, but a write speed of just 14.9MB. The irregularities in the write curve suggest that there may be some difficulty with a majority of the zones on the drive – this is possibly a sign of the drive failing due to age.
The IOPs results for writes are somewhat lower, but this may be attributed to the unusual behaviour of the writes on this drive.
Additional tests were also run.
CrystalDiskMark
CDM results seem to show a similar pattern regarding write speeds.
ATTO
Interestingly, ATTO seems to show a return to small-block access speeds being almost at full speed by 4kB.