| 160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 2.5" Hard Drive
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Installation and Operation:
Initial use found this drive installed as the secondary master in a system running Windows XP Professional. The drive was configured using the Windows Disk Management utility, and a formatted capacity of 149.05GB was then available for use.
In open air the drive was audibly undetectable while at idle, and you could faintly hear it while active. Except for the faint hum and an occasional click, the noise was minimal. Once installed inside a system, the noise was even less noticeable.
Once installed in a notebook computer, and issue arose that I haven't considered for years... The limitation of older systems (without 48-bit LBA) to access drives with capacities greater than 137GB. It hasn't been an issue for notebooks considering the capacities of drives available, but it is obviously something to consider now.
Testing:
A few synthetic and real world tests were conducted on the 160GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3, using a system with the following components:
» AMD Athlon-64 3200+ Venice core processor
» Thermalright SI-120 CPU cooler
» ASUS A8N-E nForce4 Ultra motherboard
» 2x 1GB Corsair PC3500 DDR
» 1x 200GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 SATA hard drive
» 128MB Gigabyte Radeon X600XT PCIe graphics card
For comparison purposes, a 120GB Seagate Momentus 5400.2 drive was run through the same tests as the 160GB 5400.3. Although the drives have a capacity difference of 40GB, it is as close as we can get considering 120GB is the maximum size for the 5400.2, and that the 5400.3 was only available in 160GB at this time. The 200GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 drive listed above contains the operating system, and is also where all benchmarking applications were launched from.
Tests Executed:
» HD Tach 3.0.1.0 (Quick Benchmark)
» SiSoft Sandra 2005 (File System Benchmark)
» Real World Data Transfers
» Thermal Testing
HD Tach 3.0.1.0 (Quick Benchmark) - HD Tach is a popular benchmark dedicated to the analysis of hard drive performance. It provides a few key pieces of information regarding the drive being tested, and the screen shot below details the reported CPU usage, the access time, the average read speed, and the burst (maximum) speed of the two drives. Lower values are desirable for CPU usage and access time, while higher values are better for average read speed and burst speed. The chart below compares the data from the 5400.3 drive to the 5400.2.
It can be seen that the two drives are about equal in performance, although the 5400.2 has a nominal edge in three of the four portions of this test.
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