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Seagate Momentus 7200.2 Laptop Hard Drive
Test Platform:
Our test platform consisted of the Killer Notebooks Executioner-SR for all tests. A full review of the Executioner-SR can be found here in which we named it the ultimate gaming platform, perfect to test out a hard drive aimed at delivering high performance.
- 17" Executioner-SR
- Western Digital Scorpio 120GB 5400RPM WD1200BEVS
- Seagate Momentus 200GB 7200 RPM ST9200420ASG
- Nvidia 7950GTX
- OCZ 4GB DDR2 667 RAM 5-5-5-15
- Windows XP Pro SP2
We pulled the Scorpio 120GB 5400 RPM Drive from an OEM Dell Latitude D630 and formatted it for testing in the Killer Notebooks Laptop. Seagate expects that much of the demand for the Momentus 7200.2 drive will come from the upgrade market as either an aftermarket upgrade or during the configuration of the initial laptop as in the case with Dell. it is our intent to show the performance and power differences between a 5400 RPM drive and that of the 7200.2 Momentus drive.
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Analysis:
In each of our tests the Seagate Momentus absolutely dominates the Western Digital Scorpio drive. If we look at the specifications from Seagate they specify a random seek time of 11.0 ms, in our tests we found that number to be closer to 14.8ms in both HD Tach and HD Tune. These programs show different CPU utiliations so there is no clear winner there. What becomes clear by looking at HD Tach is that the Seagate drive is definitely working at SATA II speeds while the scorpio drive lags well behind at only SATA I speeds. The additional 8MB of buffer that the Momentus drive has over the Scorpio probably gives the drive a bit of an edge in several of these tests. We additionally found it interesting that SiSoft Sandra would not allow us to compare the Momentus drive to other 2.5 inch drives, wanting instead to compare the drive to a selection of standard desktop drives. With the Western Digital Scorpio we were easily able to select other notebook drives to compare its performance to.
While HD Tune reveals that the Western Digital Scorpio drive supports Acoustic Management and Interface Power Management we found that the Scorpio drive was quite a bit more noisy than the momentus which was barely noticable unless your ear was on the drive. As for the Interface Power Management we were unable to find a complete explanation for this feature but we suspect it has to do with the ability of the hard drive to suspecnd to RAM and put the system into standby mode or sleep. In all of our testing the Seagate Momentus had no issues entering or recovering from sleep or standby.
Power:
Power is a huge concern with laptops and one of the main power consuming components in a laptop is the hard drive. We tested the affect that the Seagate drive had on battery lifetime as opposed to the Western Digital 5400RPM drive. As you can see by the pictures above the momentus at 7200RPM does come at the cost of 1 hour of less battery life when compared to the Western Digital drive. in both scenarios the laptop was fully charged, at idle, and the power scheme was set to maximum battery life. The technical speecifications for the power requirements of both drives is below. As you can see while the Seagate requires less power to read data, it does require slightly more power to write the data as well as consuming more power during idle and standby. This accounts for the decrease in battery life, however, this cost should be weighed against the performance boost that is easily noticable during use.
Western Digital WD1200BEVS |
Seagate ST9200420ASG |
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