Hard Drives: Seagate, Western Digital
Seagate Momentus 5400.5 (320 GB, 5,400 RPM)
The Momentus 5400.5 is Seagate’s latest 2.5” notebook hard drive generation. We only received the sample a few days ago, which is why there is no review on it available yet. Seagate says that this drive includes new power saving technologies, resulting in the lowest-power 5,400 RPM notebook drive ever. In fact, we found that this is the most energy-efficient 2.5” drive, as it required the least power in the random I/O benchmark and our streaming read test. However, the power requirement for playing a DVD stream was higher than with the Hitachi Travelstar 7K200, while it matches its idle power.
Western Digital WD3200BEKT (320 GB, 7,200 RPM)
Finally, we included Western Digital’s new 7,200 RPM notebook hard drive, the WD3200BEKT, which is also known as Scorpio Black Edition. This is a 16-MB cache, second-gen SATA hard drive, which WD says delivers “desktop class performance for notebook computers”. It beats many of the other drives in our random I/O and streaming read tests, and it also showed low-power requirements while playing a DVD stream. Idle power, however, was not very convincing when compared to other drives and to some of the Flash SSDs.
