Features & Specifications
The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD's biggest feature is that it needs only 0.5% more power than comparable 5400 rpm hard drives according to Seagate. The drive features Seagate's G-Force protection that helps prevent damage to the drive and loss of data in the event the notebook is dropped. The drive is the lowest power 7200 rpm storage device for laptops ever offered and features ramp load for improved idle power consumption.

Other features of the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD include a 16MB cache, SATA 3Gb/s interface with NCQ and command ordering, QuietStep technology reduces the noise output from the drive and it supports SMART monitoring. Seek power consumption is 1.554 watts and idle power is 0.67 watts. The drive can withstand 350Gs of shock when operating and 1000Gs when not operating.

Benchmarks
Earlier this week I looked at a new Hitachi 2.5-inch 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive and found it to perform well and be a good upgrade option for notebook users. I will be comparing the performance of the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD to the Hitachi drive during testing. I tested the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD drive with SiSoft Sandra XII and Everest Ultimate for the synthetic benchmarks and then moved a 5.46 GB folder to and from the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD and timed the process with a stopwatch.

Sandra XII
The first test up was Sandra XII's physical disks benchmark. The drive index for the Seagate drive was 73.81 MB/s and the random access time was 14ms. To compare the Hitachi 500GB 5400 rpm HDD had a drive index of 57.48 MB/s and a random access time of 15ms. The higher the number for the drive index, the better the performance of the drive making the 7200 rpm Seagate much better in this benchmark.

Everest Ultimate
The next test was the Everest Ultimate disk benchmark. The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD scored as follows on the test:

• Linear Read Beginning: 101.7MB/s
• Linear Read Middle: 84.9MB/s
• Linear Read End: 51.4MB/s
• Random Read: 86.8MB/s
• Buffered Read: 165.4MB/s
• Average Access Time: 16.23ms

Again the 7200 rpm Seagate trounced the 5400 RPM Hitachi HDD, which had a beginning read time of 81.1MB/s, the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD had on average about a 20MB/s speed advantage over the Hitachi drive.

File Copy
The final test was the file copy test where I copied a folder containing 5.46GB of data to and from the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD and timed the operation with a stopwatch. It took 1 minute and 27 seconds to write the folder from the system drive in my computer to the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB HDD. To write the same folder from the Seagate 500GB drive to the system drive took 1 minute and 29 seconds. Comparing that performance to the Hitachi 5400 rpm hard drive shows a virtual dead heat with the Seagate taking 3 seconds longer to write the data to the disk. The performance on other file types and large data sets could be much more in favor of the Seagate.