Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 14 July 2008 20:24
Opinion and Analysis
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Then we have Seagate’s developments in the 2.5-inch notebook hard disk world to contend with. Here they have two models, the slower 5400RPM drive and the faster 7200RPM model, known as the Momentus 5400.6 and the Momentus 7200.4.
These will start shipping in Q4 2008, and will give laptop and notebook makers the ability to give mobile users the most space ever, either by shipping a single 500GB hard drive or putting two drives in the mix for a cool terabyte of inbuilt mobile storage at 5400RPM or 7200RPM speeds.
Now in case you’re thinking “hey, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Samsung have already announced 500GB 2.5-inch drives”, you’d be right.
But Hitachi’s was a 12.5mm thick drive, instead of the normal 9.5mm thickness, and spun at 5400RPM, Fujitsu’s at 4200RPM and Samsung’s at 5400RPM, so Seagate’s 7200RPM drive is new and will make mobile power users feeling the need for speed most happy.
As you can imagine, Seagate characterises this as delivering “the best combination of capacity, mobility and durability for mainstream and high-performance notebook computers, external storage solutions, PCs and industrial applications requiring small form factor.”
Both “Momentus” models are the fourth generation of Seagate laptop drives to us the PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) technology an dcome with some nice technical features.
The 5400.6 model is SATA at 3Gb/second, runs at 5400RPM, has 8MB of cache and comes in sizes of 120GB to 500GB, while the 7200.4 model runs at 7200RPM, is also SATA 3GB/sec, has a 16MB cache and comes in sizes from 250GB to 500GB.
As they are notebook drives meant for mobile use, they’ve been built to “withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration.”
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