Installation and Operation:
The physical installation of the Momentus drive was simple, and went exactly as expected. Since it is an OEM product, you will need your own screws and cables, but if this is an upgrade you probably already have them.
The Seagate Momentus drive was installed and tested in a Serener GS-L01 Fanless Mini-ITX case that houses a VIA Nehemiah M10000 motherboard/processor, 512MB of Crucial DDR, internal power board, optical drive, and hard drive in an enclosure not much larger than a typical 5.25" external drive enclosure.
The key feature of this case is that there are no cooling fans, and the housing itself acts like a giant heatsink. The processor and motherboard chipset use heatpipes to draw heat to the outer wall, where the heat is dissipated passively. Other components in the case do not have any cooling assistance, and it is key that items like the memory and drives run cool, as well as quiet.
The entire case is closed, with no openings for ventilation or fans, so any hard drive installed needs to keep itself cool. This can be done via lower rotational speeds and enhanced power management, two features that the 5400.2 Seagate Momentus drive offers.
The system is primarily used as a home theater personal computer (HTPC), and it runs Windows XP Professional with the Media Portal shell installed on top of it. The drive that was previously installed in this system is a 10GB Toshiba MK1517GAP 4200 RPM, ATA-100 drive. It handled the basic functions of the HTPC applications well, but the specifications indicate that it is definitely on the low side when it comes to performance.
The system did not have any problems while operating with the Toshiba drive, but from my experience with other systems it seemed like it could do some things faster. Areas like booting up into Media Portal, playing multimedia files, and copying large files from elsewhere on the network are things I was hoping to improve.
To gauge the HTPC experience with the Seagate Momentus drive, I simply cloned the contents of Toshiba drive onto it and continued operating the system as normal. The first thing that I noticed was that the Seagate drive was definitely quieter while the drive was active and while idling. The Toshiba drive is quiet, but there is a faint whirring sound, even when the drive is not being accessed, and it only increases when in use. This sound might not be an issue in a typical computer system, but when nothing else is making a sound, drive noises seem far more pronounced. On top of that, you do not want your HTPC atmosphere punctuated with any sounds other than those from the movies or music you are playing. A suspenseful, quiet scene in a movie can easily be ruined by the sound of hardware in action.
The speed increase was also noticeable. Windows did load a bit quicker, nothing worth getting excited about, but Media Portal loaded much faster. It used to take 15 seconds or so to load once Windows had loaded, and that has now been cut to around 9 seconds. Multimedia files all run as expected, and the system seems to be able to queue them up much quicker. From a folder full of MP3s to large movie files, my access to all of the HTPC content seems much quicker and much more convenient. The drive's speed is bolstered by the 8MB of cache memory, which seems to be the standard quantity for most drives today, although some drives are now just starting to utilize 16MB of cache memory.
The low noise and more than adequate performance of the Seagate Momentus drive has me convinced that it is an excellent choice for an HTPC application such as this. It provides about as much storage space as you can get in a drive this size, it operates quietly, and can keep pace with the demands of seamless media playback. There are a few more areas worth considering though, so lets continue on to some benchmarking and thermal testing.
|
|
