One of the never ending problems people have
with their computers is that there is never enough hard drive
space. A few years ago people said you wouldn't fill up
a 10GB hard drive, and now its a 80GB drive, with the 10GB just
being Windows and a game or two.
Laptops have been catching up with their desktop
companions in many areas in the last few years. Processors
are within a couple speed grades, video cards are less than a
generation behind, and RAM isn't an issue. However
with the size increase in hard drives in desktop systems, with
160GB and higher being fairly common, laptops are still behind
in this area. Most laptops average a 60GB hard drive with
their standard configuration.
Seagate has been a hard drive manufacturer
for quite a while, with many of their SCSI drives being used by
many corporations over the last decade. Their IDE and now
SATA drives are also very nice, as they are quiet, and offer new
technologies quite quickly. They have also used these strategies
in their laptop drives.
Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB HD
Today we will be looking at the Seagate Momentus
120GB 5400RPM laptop hard drive. For a look at Seagate's
specifications on this hard drive, please check
their website. We will look at what most of the specifications
mean to the user in the review but first lets take a look at this
drive.
Since most laptops already
come with a hard drive and installing a new one is a matter
of remove old one put new one in, the drive is supplied as just
that the drive by itself.
As you can see from the last picture this
is a standard 2.5" hard drive, pretty much identical to every
other one out there. The only visual differences is that
the top cover isn't covering all the top of the drive compared
to the Hitachi hard drive right next to it.
Installation varies depending on the device
you are putting the hard drive in. I put it in an external
case and inside my eMachine m6805 laptop and really it didn't
take much effort, just a few screws and the drive slides in.
Every laptop is different so your experience may vary, but there
is usually some instructions available either with the product
or online.
The hard drive itself is a 5400RPM drive,
which is nothing that may be interesting to desktop computer users,
as these drives are at a minimum 5400RPM but mostly 7200RPM these
days. However laptops are still normally shipped with 4200RPM
hard drives, for battery life and power considerations as well
as price. So a higher RPM hard drive can make a difference,
performance wise, when put in a laptop drive. The 8MB buffer
is also a standard for desktop drives but nice to see in this
drive.
The rated average seek time of 12.5ms is also
decent compared to other drives, about 3ms slower than most desktop
drives but slightly faster than the Hitachi hard drive we will
look at in comparison. The Toshiba MK2018GAP 20GB hard drive
we also used had a slightly better seek time of 12ms according
to the specs. We must remember that these are what the specifications
for the drives are from the manufacturer, we will see if this
holds up in our tests.
Benchmarking System
| Laptop: |
eMachine m6805 Laptop |
| CPU
Clock Speed: |
800MHz - 1.8GHz |
| CPU: |
AMD
Athlon 64 (Clawhammer) s754
|
| Memory: |
Samsung
PC2700 SODIMM (2*256MB) |
| Memory
Timings: |
2.5-3-3-10 |
| Memory
Speed: |
320MHz (DDR) |
| Hard
Drives: |
Hitachi
Travelstar 4K80 60GB 4200RPM
|
Toshiba MK2018GAP 20GB 4200RPM |
Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB 5400RPM |
| Video
Card: |
ATI
Radeon 9600 64MB |
| Operating
System: |
Windows
XP Home SP2 Direct X 9c |
| Drivers: |
Catalyst
4.6 |
| Other
Devices: |
Hotdrive
2.5" external case (USB 2.0/ IEEE1394) |
| Benchmarks: |
HD
Tach 3.0 |
|
VirtualDub 1.6.4 |
|
Winamp
5.08d |
The benchmarks were run three
times, with the desktop running at a resolution of 1280*800.
As a reference the computer was run on battery power with everything
disabled (wireless, extra programs) and the screen at its brightest
level, with Winamp playing music and the battery life then measured.
The Toshiba hard drive was tested using the external case, which
didn't make a difference in the results compared to internal
use, for this drive at least. Both of the other drives
were tested internally.
The VirtualDub test involved doing a direct
stream copy of a 841MB video file from/to the test hard drive,
while on battery power. The results were measured in battery
life, and how many times the file was copied. With HD Tach
we ran the Long Bench on each drive. The file copy test
used a folder of 2176 files with a total size of 2.47GB.
Most of these test files were in the 30-50KB range or the 2MB
range with the one 841MB file mentioned above also being included.
Benchmark Results
First we will take a look at the synthetic
results in the form of HD Tach. This program has been a
standard one for measuring drive read performance across the entire
drive, so lets see the results.
Now we will look at the file transfer test.
This is a simple internal folder to folder copy of the 2.47GB
of data. So lets see how these drives did. Times are
in the format minutes: seconds. milliseconds
|
File Copy Test
|
Toshiba MK2018GAP |
Hitachi 4K80 |
Seagate 5400.2 |
| Time Taken: |
22:43.82 |
11:20.11 |
4:16.15 |
| Average MB/s: |
1.86 |
3.72 |
9.89 |
Quite an interesting result
here. The Toshiba drive only manages 1.86MB/s in our copy
test, while the Hitachi gets 3.72MB/s and the Seagate 9.89MB/s.
The difference between the two 4200RPM drives is 100% and the
difference between the Hitachi and the Seagate drive is 165%.
This difference between the Hitachi and the Toshiba could be
attributed to the differences in buffer size of 8MB and 2MB
respectively as many of the files might be just over the cache
size of the Toshiba drive. The difference between the
Seagate and Hitachi can partially be explained by the difference
in the drives' different RPM. The only explanation for
the remaining difference is that the Seagate has a higher areal
density compared to the Hitachi drive, 94 Gb/in2 to 68.5Gb/in2.
Lets see if this result continues in our battery life stress
test.
Seagate states that their 5400RPM drive provides
pretty much the same battery life as a comparable 4200RPM hard
drive. So we ran a test using VirtualDub to do a direct
stream copy of a video file that is 840MB. We used the built
in job control to create about 75 instances of this test.
We started this test and pulled the power out so that this test
was running completely in battery mode. The CPU usage was
less than 10% in all cases, thus the CPU was running at 800MHz.
As a reference we ran the computer in battery mode using just
Winamp to see maximum battery life at these settings, so lets
see the results. Battery life is in Hours: Minutes. Seconds
format.
| VirtualDub Test |
Reference Battery Life |
Hitachi 4K80 |
Seagate 5400.2 |
| Battery Life: |
2:14.23 |
2:00.57 |
1:58.20 |
| Number of Runs: |
0 |
35.40 |
62.25 |
| Average MB/s |
0 |
4.71 |
7.60 |
What does this test show?
Looking just at this from a battery life standpoint the Hitachi
and Seagate are within 2% of each other, however they have an
11% shorter battery life than if they are not in use.
Both drives in the system still offer about two hours of battery
life, though this is the worst case as the brightness of the
screen is at its maximum, and different laptops have different
battery lives. Moving onto the performance aspect of this
test we see that the Seagate drive performs more runs of the
test than the Hitachi drive by about 75%, which leads to its
higher data rate. Again this can be attributed to the
same reasons we discussed in the previous test, though the results
aren't quite as different.
Conclusion
We've looked at this drive and its performance,
what does this show us?
The drive, as with basically all OEM drives
comes as just that, the bare drive, nothing else. Since
its target is laptops or external drive bays/MP3 players it really
doesn't need anything else. Installation in my laptop and
external enclosure were pretty easy with a few screws holding
the drive bracket in (thank you eMachines). Seagate's warranty
is among the best I've seen at five years, which is much better
than the one year or so that comes with laptops (and thus their
hard drives) or the three years offered by others
Performance is what this drive is targeted
to excel at, an it seems to do so fairly well. In our tests
we saw it do markedly better than the Hitachi drive in most tests
that focused on performance. Battery life was slightly lower
than that of the Hitachi drive but within 2% of that drive.
Price is always a factor in our tests.
This drive costs in the range of $250 (US) at the time of writing,
which is about $80 higher than the 100GB version of this drive.
Remember that the cost of this drive would be in addition to your
laptops' price as most places don't provide this hard drive as
an upgrade option. The price of the 100GB is pretty much
in line with the 5400RPM competition, and the 120GB is really
in a class all its own as there is no other drive on
Price Grabber, at the moment anyway.
Good Points
- Very Good Performance
- 120GB in a 2.5" hard drive
- Same Power usage as 4200RPM drive
- 5 Year Warranty
Bad Points
- Price
- Not 7200RPM (Another model by Seagate is offered)
Final Words
This drive has performance that outclasses
most other stock laptop drives by quite a bit, and the size doesn't
hurt either. However the price does and while I definitely
recommend this class of drive I'd point to the 100GB unless you
really need that extra 20GB.
If
you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
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