Currently only available to OEMs, although it should be released later to the consumer market, Seagate’s Momentus hard drive upgrade kit is designed to boost the common bottleneck issue of hard drive performance in notebooks, tablet PCs, digital audio players and blade servers.
The improvements come courtesy of several changes, including lowered power consumption, drawing roughly that of a 4,200rpm drive whilst operating at 5,400rpm speeds; FDB motor and QuietStep Ramp Load Technology for silent operation while 225G operational shock tolerance helps to reduce the failure rate of drives while in rugged notebook operating environments. Claiming up to 47 percent performance increases on such tasks as opening 12MB files and Windows XP shut down, the Momentus drive comes with a standard 2MB cache, with an optional 8MB cache model offering anywhere up to an additional 15 percent performance on top.
Hard drive performance on notebooks has lagged a long way behind that of other components. These days Pentium 4 CPUs, DDR RAM and the latest graphics GPUs are all available in mobile form, although hard drives are still running at 4,200rpm, which desktop PCs dispensed with over five years ago. Notebooks also often have less RAM than desktops, necessitating usage of virtual memory, which can significantly reduce performance if it’s being read from a slow drive.
We benched the Momentus and our Fujitsu 4,200rpm drive in Diskspeed32, and the Momentus excelled in all tests, accessing greater amounts of data and returning almost double the Fujitsu’s overall score, with 3,038 compared to 1,698.
Also notable is Seagate's QuietStep Ramp Load Technology, which controls the speed at which the heads load and unload, making it much quieter than if the disk's head speeds are unregulated. Unloading onto a ramp and parking off the disk saves on head wear and tear and greatly reduces the risk of 'head slap' by the heads hitting the disk's platter during shock. It does this during idle modes and while still operating (standby) to save on the life and safety of the drive.
While the drive is not available retail at the moment, and we don’t have pricing, it's clear the Momentus is the speediest notebook drive around, and will be a must-have for notebook performance buffs. As an OEM only product, if you’re buying a notebook it would pay to ask if you can get one installed at purchase.