Test Setup

Gateway MX6420 AMD Turion 64 1.8GHz Laptop - 1.8GHz, 512MB ram, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, Windows XP Pro SP2.

The stock hard drive in the Gateway MX6420 is an 80GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K100 (5400RPM). We had an old Travelstar 40GH kicking around, so we'll be adding that to the mix. We already know ahead of time that it'll be killed where performance but we're more concerned about the battery life and heat compared to the Seagate Momentus 5400.3. We did have access to a 7200RPM drive but it failed during testing. We'll comment more on this at the end of the review.

Keep in mind that all configurations, including identical laptop models, may differ in some ways. Each drive was loaded with our own configuration of Windows XP and required files for benchmarking using Norton Ghost. All drives were defragged once prior to all testing after the restore using the built in defrag tool.

Windows Boot Time

The first test is checking out how quickly Windows boots. The stop watch starts the minute the POST screen disappears. Lower bars represent faster boot times.

The 5400RPM drives are the fastest of the bunch, with the Momentus 5400.3 netting the best time.

Sysmark 2004 Office Productivity

The Travelstar 5K100 falls a little behind here compared to the Seagate drive.

Iometer

This is strictly a synthetic benchmark, but we felt it was worth throwing in to see the theoretical limits of the hard drives. The Momentus 5400.3 has tremendous potential here, running almost 30% faster than the Hitachi Travelstar.

Read Speeds 480MB

We wrote 480MB of data from the 2.5" drives to a Corsair Flash Voyager. Data was read off the Momentus 5400.3 the fastest.

Write Speeds 480MB

We reversed the previous test and wrote 480MB to the 2.5" drives. The Momentus was slightly faster than the Travelstar 5K100 and significantly faster than the 40GH.

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