Seagate Momentus 7200 Notebook HDD

Not just the first notebook hard drive to provide 500GB capacity at 7200 RPM, it turns out to be a mean performer as well

Saturday, August 01, 2009

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Till recently, if you ever thought of upgrading your notebook's HDD, then the best bet in capacity and performance was a 500 GB HDD running at 5400 RPM. This is a far cry from desktop HDDs that have broken barriers of capacity and spindle speeds. One of the key reasons is the smaller form factor of notebook HDDs that has made it difficult for manufacturers to make them faster and with greater capacities. While it's difficult, it's not impossible, and Seagate has proven that with an aptly named notebook HDD called Momentus 7200.4, which has 500 GB capacity and 7200 RPM spindle speed. This makes it the fastest 500 GB notebook drive available today.

Unlike other notebook drives, the Momentus 7200.4 also has 16 MB cache memory while other drives in this category have 8 MB memory. It is a standard 2.5 inch drive with 9.5 mm thickness that can be used with any notebook. Other features include: a SATA interface that enables data transfer rate from drive's buffer to interface at 3 GB/sec, with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) that optimizes the order in which received read and write commands are executed. And it uses perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) techniques and can withstand 1000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock. Such a technique parks the read-head safely so that it does not scratch the surface. With notebooks, battery backup is a prime concern and this drive truly addresses this by drawing only slightly more power than the 5400 RPM counterparts. Momentus 7200.4 just sips 1.554 W for seek operations, which is higher by just 0.1 W as compared to a standard 500 GB HDD, 5400RPM drive. When compared to Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B, the price per GB of the Momentus is lower at Rs 13.7/GB against Rs 14.4/GB for Hitachi.

We tested the drive on an Intel Core 2 Duo-based machine with 1GB RAM. To evaluate its performance we ran the HD Tune benchmark that gave an average transfer rate of 78.5 MB/sec with an access time of 17.2ms. As expected, the drive fared better than other 5400RPM drives which clocked only 64.4 MB/s transfer rate.

BOTTOM LINE: It packs a lot of storage capacity and delivers on performance as well. A must have for frequent travelers.

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