Game Loading Time - Doom 3 Enpro

Lower times are better

Our notebook was chugging with the 4200RPM Travelstar and was much happier with the 5400RPM drives.

Game Loading Time - Far Cry Fort

Lower times are better

Again, significant gains with the faster drives with the Momentus on top.

Final Words

Seagate has made some comparisons with the Momentus 5400.3, comparing it to 4200RPM drive-like battery consumption and heat output. We don't have any scientific method available for testing power consumption, but we did get a good idea via playing a DVD ripped on to the hard drive. We loaded up War of the Worlds and let it run off the hard drive. Below is a chart of the percentage of battery power at certain points of the film.

Time (Minutes)	10	30	60	90
Momentus 5400.3	92%	79%	49%	9%
Travelstar 5K100	85%	71%	40%	4%
Travelstar 40GH	88%	77%	45%	6%

I already know from experience the movie always drains the battery before it ends, and it did this with all three drives. While we were never able to get an exact time before shutdown, but at the 1% battery mark, the Momentus 5400.3 was at the 1 hour, 48 minute and 33 second mark; the Travelstar 5K100 at 1 hour, 34 minutes and 21 seconds; and the Travelstar 40GH at 1 hour, 39 minute and 34 seconds.

As for heat:

The Travelstar 40GH ran slightly cooler than the Momentus 5400.3, which in turns runs quite a bit cooler under load.

Performance was very good, and for a 5400RPM drive we would consider the performance excellent overall. Our 7200RPM Travelstar died during testing, but the Momentus 5400.3 was very comparable to the faster Travelstar in many of our throughput benchmarks. The Travelstar was faster in the Sysmark test and 480MB write tests, and the Momentus quicker with Windows boot and game level loading. Unfortunately, we could not complete testing, so we left it out all together.

Right now, the only issue we can see for some buyers is the fact Seagate does not currently have a perpendicular recording drive with a SATA interface. This is coming, but it's unknown when we'll see these drives come in. Pricing is also something of a question mark at this time as we were unable to find anything on for this specific model.

That said, Seagate has addressed three issues with current 2.5" drive technologies... capacity, heat and power consumption. Performance is no slouch either, and anyone looking for a high capacity drive that sips power without burning a hole through your desk will want to give the Momentus 5400.3 a very close look.