In the world of 3.5” desktop hard drives, most manufacturers have brought to market drives with capacities of 1TB, 1.5TB, and even 2TB. Sadly, these cannot be put into laptops or MicroPCs like the Mac Mini or ASUS Eee PC very easily, leaving those of us in the portable world relying on external disks " or home servers - for our mass storage needs. Most laptops ship with paltry drives... our test mule shipped with a laughable 80GB drive. A quick peruse of the Internet shows that most OEMs are shipping their laptops with drives in the 160GB to 250GB range. They do however, offer larger capacity drives with a larger price tag. If you’re like most of us, with large music and video libraries, you desperately need the extra storage space, but you want it without having to lug around a bulky external drive or the added extra expense.
Today on the test bench we have the
Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500GB 2.5” SATA drive. Before we get into the details on this drive, let’s take a quick peek at what Seagate says about it on the
official product page.
Features:
Key Advantages:
» Designed-in G-Force Protection technology
» Leverages Seagate laptop power management technology, delivering the lowest-power
5400-RPM laptop hard drive yet
» QuietStep™ technology enables ultra-quiet load/unload acoustics.
» 1000 Gs of non-operating shock make the drive ideal for all notebook PCs and industrial
applications.
» Energy-efficient power for maximum performance
» 8-MB cache enhances performance.
» SATA 3 GB/s with Native Command Queuing enables fast data transfers.
» Perpendicular recording technology delivers the capacity points you need.
Best-Fit Applications:
» Mainstream laptops
» External storage solutions/boxes
» Industrial applications requiring a smaller form factor
Specifications:
» Model Number :ST9500325ASG
» Interface: SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ
» Cache: 8 Mbytes
» Capacity: 500 GB
» Spindle Speed: 5,400 rpm
» Average latency: 5.6 msec
» Random read seek time: 14 msec
» Acoustics, Idle (bels): 2.4
» Acoustics, Seek (bels): 2.6
» Annualized Failure Rate: 0.48%
» Shock, Operating: 2ms (Gs): 350
» Shock, Non-Operating: 1ms (Gs): 1000
» Power, Idle/Standby: 0.81/0.22 watts
» Power, Seek: 1.54 watts
» Power, Read/Write: 2.6/2.85watts
Unfortunately there is no warranty info on Seagate’s web site (or on listings at places like
Newegg.com). A quick call to the helpful folks at Seagate revealed that the retail box version gets a 5 year backing, while the OEM product (which we received) carries 3 years of support.
