| Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB Hard Drive
|
Testing:
The installation and operation portion of this review provided the bulk of the "testing" data that really concerned me. The Seagate Momentus 5400.2 drive has already proven that it can handle the tasks I require, and it did so with minimal noise and no issues what-so-ever. For those who want to see numbers in their reviews, the following tests were run on the Seagate Momentus 5400.2 drive, as well as on the hard drive previously configured in this HTPC.
• HD Tach 3.0.1.0 (Long Benchmark)
• SiSoft Sandra 2005 (File System Benchmark)
• PC Wizard 2005 (Hard Disk Benchmark)
• Thermal testing
The first three tests listed above are synthetic benchmarks available in some form as a free download from the links provided. The thermal testing consisted of monitoring the idle and active temperatures of the hard drives outer surfaces using a Cooler Master Aerogate bay device.
The following table compares the key features of the two drives being tested:
| Model |
Seagate Momentus 5400.2 |
Toshiba XXXXXX |
| Capacity |
120GB |
10GB |
| Interface |
ATA-100 |
ATA-100 |
| Rotational Speed |
5400 RPM |
4200 RPM |
| Cache Memory |
8MB |
2MB ? |
On paper it looks like a blowout is in the works, with the Seagate drive holding the edge in just about all categories. To level the playing field in terms of the area of the disk that the tests would have to access, the Seagate drive was partitioned into two areas, with one large partition and then a 10GB partition for testing.
HD Tach 3.0.1.0 (Long 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 Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB drive.
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 Seagate Momentus drive to the Toshiba drive.
The performance of the two drives really is not all that different in this benchmark. Despite the increased rotational speed and greater cache memory of the Momentus drive, the results are closer than I was expecting. The one result that stands out in favor of the Seagate drive is the average read speed, where it performs roughly 54% better, which is quite a sizable difference.
|
|
|
|
