5,400 Rpm: Seagate Momentus 40 GB
According to Seagate, the Momentus' chief highlight is not only its performance of 5,400 rpm speed, but also its power consumption. According to the company, the drive will consume about the same amount of power as 4,200 rpm devices.
The specs, however, tell a different story. The Momentus, in fact, consumes the greatest amount of power, totaling 0.97 W during, its idle phase.
So is the company's marketing hype about the drive's power consumption a load of bull? Not quite, since Seagate puts the claim in context on its website from which we copied the following chart:
Seagate says it benchmarked four notebook models using BatteryMark from eTestingLabs and BAPCo's MobileMark. Conclusion: the average battery benchmark is less than 10 minutes compared to an unidentified Hitachi drive running at 4,200 rpm.
This detail alone gives rise to several hypotheses: can a faster-spinning hard drive make up for the slight increase in power consumption through better performance under high loads? If that's the case, how would the Travelstar 7K60 fare under a similar test?
These issues are beyond the scope of this article. However, we will shortly be tackling the question at its root in a follow-up article to appear in our Mobile Guide.
For its debut in the 2.5" world, the Momentus does very well. It does total justice to Seagate's claim of silence for its desktop drives; noise levels compared to 4,200 rpm drives were only marginally exceeded.
