Why the Momentus 5400.3?
Seagate offers a wide range of drives for enterprise, desktop, and portable devices; so why launch perpendicular recording in a 5400 RPM, 2.5" notebook drive?
Going back just over two years, Seagate wasn't even in the notebook market. They re-entered with their Momentus line of 2.5" drives and in that short span went from 0% of the market share up to 12%. A nice increase, but they would obviously like to see that number continue to rise. Introducing a new technology to a segment you are looking to grow will no doubt help, but take a look at the notebook drive market as a whole for another good reason for this launch.
Presently, 120GB is the limit for 2.5" drives, while 3.5" drives have climbed all the way to 500GB. Quite a difference, and one that notebook users might be interested in seeing improved. Given the power of today's notebook computer, and their prevalence in business and home use, 120GB could be easy to fill whether it be with business applications, multimedia files, or even 3D games. Considering notebooks generally have room for just one or two drives, optimizing that space is key.
The Momentus 5400.3 line of hard drives will address the issues mentioned above, will provide the industry's first perpendicular recording 2.5" drive, and offer a well focused launch for Seagate's perpendicular recording technology.
The graphic below was produced by Seagate and shows the capacities of all 2.5" drives produced from 2001 on, as well as providing a forecast for future production. What we see is that just a few years ago the maximum capacity was 30-40GB, and that even now 40GB drives are the most common size produced. We see that the capacities have slowly risen to 120GB in 2005, but that smaller drives still dominate the market. Now take a look into the future and Seagate's expectations for the 2.5" market. By 2007 they expect 80GB drives to be the most common, but the maximum will have shifted from 120GB up to 200GB.
The initial release of Momentus 5400.3 drives will offer capacities of 40GB to 160GB, and all of the drives will have PATA interfaces only. SATA may be the hot topic among desktop hard drives, but it has not yet been well developed for notebook computers. This is due to a general lack of chipset support, as well as performance limitations in the drives that don't fully take advantage of what SATA is capable of.
According to the graphic below, only 12% of notebook hard drives were SATA in the year 2005. As all the necessary factors come together it can be seen that this number will increase rapidly, and that by 2008 all drives are expected to be SATA!
Seagate is fast at work developing their own SATA drives with perpendicular recording technology, and consumers can expect to see SATA 1.5Gbps drives by June 2006 (with capacities of 80GB-160GB), and SATA 3Gbps drives will hit the market sometime in 2007.
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