Seagate Momentus 7200 Notebook HDD

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.