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Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST9320421AS

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12:20 PM - 08/28/2008 by Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos

Seagate has brought its third-generation Momentus high-performance notebook hard drive to market: the Momentus 7200.3. Seagate didn’t offer any 250 GB drives with the Momentus 7200.3, so this represents a significant step forward. Seagate says that “industry-leading 7,200-RPM performance meets the industry’s lowest power consumption levels”. That’s a strong statement that we didn’t want to leave unverified.

High Performance? Check.

The 15.6 ms average access time is a good result, but it doesn’t reach the 14.3 ms of its predecessor, nor the 15.4 ms of WD’s Scorpio Black. The IOMeter I/O benchmark results provide more proof. The new Momentus 7200.3 does well, but it’s not top of the class here.

Still, it does provide better throughput than any other 2.5” drive before: 89 MB/s maximum read transfer rate is a new record; the average throughput is only slightly below 70 MB/s. These are results that match a 2-year old 3.5” hard drive.

The Momentus 7200.3 does well in the PCMark05 Windows XP startup benchmark, although it doesn’t dominate, and it’s second in the file write benchmark.

Model Features? Check.

Seagate offers capacities of 320 GB, 250 GB, 200 GB, 160 GB, 120 GB and 80 GB, all running at 7,200 RPM and using a 16 MB cache memory, as well as SATA/300 with native command queuing.

Seagate is one out of only two hard drive manufacturers to provide a full five-year warranty, and the Momentus 7200.3 is specified for up to 60°C operating temperature. Both of these specs are only matched by Western Digital.

G-Force Onboard

G-Force doesn’t have anything in common with Nvidia’s GeForce graphics family, although the two sound alike. Rather, it stands for Seagate’s implementation of a drive free fall sensor. Seagate says that the mechanism works within three tenths of a second, which gives you a good impression of the feature: it cannot prevent damage if, for example, you operate such a drive vertically, and overturn it into a horizontal position, or if you drop a notebook onto a table from a short distance. But it will definitely help if you drop the notebook all the way onto the floor.

Low Power? Check.

Seagate claims best-in-class efficiency, and the firm is right about that. The measured 0.95 W idle power is the lowest hard drive idle power we measured for all 7,200 RPM drives. As a matter of fact, only a few 5,400 RPM drives show better results. Once the drive switches into a low power idle state after longer inactivity, we measured 0.78 W, which is as close as we could get to the specified 0.75 W for low power idle, and is a lower power requirement than we measured for the competition.

The results are reflected by our performance per watt tests on a notebook, where we looked at workstation-type I/O performance and streaming read performance. In both cases, the Momentus 7200.3 achieved excellent results.

There is still some room for improvement, though. When only a defined data stream is required (we played a DVD video file), this drive required 1.9 W. Hitachi and Western Digital show that this can be done at much lower power requirements, which eventually can contribute to longer battery life when watching movies.

Talkback
thomasxstewart 08/29/2008 2:10 AM
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Anonymous 08/29/2008 4:07 AM
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Not sure where you got the mention of raid from in the article, but regardless, RAID has nothing to do with platters. Its simply how data is dealt with across multiple DRIVES.

With SSD's you get a pretty big performance increase from using raid-0. It works the same as with a hard drive with data being split amongst the two drives so less time is needed to write and read since the work is being divided.

Just google SSD and Raid and you'll find better examples and benchmarks.

Anonymous 08/29/2008 4:17 AM
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I'm surprised that the lack of encryption on most of the drives wasn't mentioned in the conclusion. It's a deal breaker for every drive mentioned except the Hitachi, unless you plan to leave your laptop locked to a desk.

Luscious 08/29/2008 4:28 AM
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That Seagate drive sound like an amazing upgrade for something like the HP mininote. I sure hope some speedy 500GB drives arrive next.

Anonymous 08/29/2008 4:55 AM
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It would have been nice if the prices & performance charts were also given in the conclusion. Maybe it's there somewhere in the middle pages, but I really don't have time to read 17 pages. Most of the time it's just the first and the last pages.

thomasxstewart 08/29/2008 4:55 AM
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thanks for reply, RAID was added after article was posted & its here:

Eight Memoright state-of-the-art Flash SSDs battle Seagate’s Cheetahhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah 15K.5 and Savvio 10K.2 in RAID configurations. Flash SSDs turn out to be far superior when it comes to I/O-intensive workloads, while they don’t necessarily beat mechanical hard drives when it comes to throughput.

I read it fast & comparison is to HDD Raid. Opps, its on p.3 bottom & just glanced as read it as admendium.Basic point is still SSD works without RAID better than HDD.I just was trying to State SSD ?isn't RAID, unless it is & might be worse for it?. NEXT:

In theRegisture few weeks ago Server SSD was listed with pics of in production SSD that cut 4.5 Gb/s data output. I thought, how powerful, what is this? Well, while watching obama I got idea. first new SSD is DDR2, so how could that be SSD or even drive & lets face it at 4.5 gb/s who needs work divided? yet heres what I thought up: That new SSD that is so powerful & server & DDR2 cann't be turned off. That would work. turn it on, load it up & leave it running. 4.5 gb/s from one SSD. BTW i once before mentioned SSD RAID being NOT same as Platter RAID & I got same answer you gave today, so maybe its possible, yet Stats are next step.
Whole thing is proof, NEVER TURN YOUR BRAIN OFF. Hahahaahhh.

Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

Anonymous 08/29/2008 6:46 AM
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i install SSD and yes boot time faster and applications run faster but only if you work with one at the time. If two or more you feel like 10 years ago working on P4 or P3

Anonymous 08/29/2008 7:06 AM
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I like the review but don't agree with the conclusion. The WD 3200BEKT is faster in every non synthetic benchmark. The Seagate 7200.3 is only the fastest in synthetic benchmarks. So if you're after real life performance go for the WD. Check the review on Techreport for more information.

Anonymous 08/29/2008 6:34 PM
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Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital send their latest high-performance notebook drives into battle, fighting for the ultimate balance between performance and efficiency.

Next-Gen 7,200 RPM Notebook Hard Drives : Read more

NotSoParanoid 08/30/2008 3:58 AM
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I agree with the poster that said encryption is a must for portable devices -- only a complete moron would walk around with an unencrypted notebook these days. Encryption is now a *fundamental* requirement for not only government agencies, but also most companies. So the comparison as it stands is fundamentally flawed. the tests should be repeated with the hardware encryption enabled on the Hitachi drive and a comparable AES full disk software based encryption running on the others to give us an idea how the drives would perform in a real usage scenario.

Anonymous 08/31/2008 3:07 AM
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I agree with the other post, in that encryption should results should have been included in the results. I am looking to upgrade my laptop hard drive and after having a laptop stolen last year, my next drive will be one that has full hardware encryption. THG, please start including benchmarks and reviews of drives with encryption. Thanks, appreciate your work.

Mike

TakeyMcTaker 09/01/2008 10:05 AM
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Why would encryption hardware need to be a part of the hard drive? It is better for the BIOS to take care of the encryption/decryption, and key entry at boot time. That existing BIOS feature makes encryption a moot point for a performance article like this. You guys are just buying the wrong notebooks, if you need encryption on the hard drive.

NotSoParanoid 09/01/2008 10:01 PM
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I am aware of no "BIOS Encryption" which is certified by NIST as secure under FIPS-140-2. There are certified encrypted drive solutions. When someone delivers a certified BIOS encryption I'll consider it -- though there is a risk: with an encrypted drive, if the original machine fails and I know the keys, I can recover by simply installing the drive in a new system. With "BIOS Encryption" the drive is tied to exactly one machine. Better have good backups. ;-)

djfourmoney 09/02/2008 7:15 AM
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Just in time for PS3's....

Adam03 09/04/2008 12:12 PM
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I am not interested in mechanical drives any more - they are yesterday's technology. Give me SSD at its full potential. Mechanical drives will soon become yesterday's equivalent of the steam engine. Why do these companies bother wasting their time "tweaking" storage space on mechanical drives when we would rather get our hands on a 300 Gig SSD ?

Anonymous 09/17/2008 6:50 PM
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Do I get this right?

The WD is faster when it comes to access tme, working with small files - e.g. office files - and consumes considerably less power with DVD files (thinking of those long train rides...)? How much more battery life would that give me app. on a MacBook Pro?

The Seagate basically is faster when it comes to handling larger files and has a lower power consumption on average?

Does anyone have insights on the noise?

Anonymous 10/07/2008 2:36 PM
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I can't find the ST9320421AS anywhere when I search for someone who has them in stock. Anyone know why?

http://edbpriser.dk/Products/Listp [...] T9320421AS

Anonymous 10/09/2008 7:43 AM
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The conclusions regarding the lowest idle power do not match the graphic. The wrong WD drive is shown as being the reviewed drive. The graphic shows the WD2500BEVS as being the reviewed drive with a .75W idle when the reviewed drive is supposed to be the WD3200BEKT which has the second highest idle of .97W of the 4 tested drives. The conclusion says that the WD & SG drives are both less than .8W idle which is wrong. Only the SG drive is under .8W.

Anonymous 11/03/2008 4:22 PM
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All this for $99 on Newegg. Why Can't I see what I'm typing here?

Weird.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136280

kultex 11/06/2008 11:50 AM
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very interresting and informativ article, but beside all the power and performance ratings, for me noise is the most important rating for a decision - could a add perhaps some lines for the 7200rpm drives?

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