Fast and Furious: New 7200 mobile drives from Hitachi And Seagate

Seagate Momentus 7200.1 Serial ATA

Seagate characterizes its Momentus 7200.1 as a 2.5" storage device for workstation class notebooks. Rather than offering 80 and 100 GB, Seagate decided to go for 40, 60 and 100 GB capacity points. According to the data sheet, the areal density is a bit higher than for the Hitachi drive: 83 Gbits per square inch, versus 81 for Hitachi.

The Serial ATA version benefits from Seagate's advanced Native Command Queuing (NCQ) enabled interface, while this command reordering feature is not available for the UltraATA/100 version. Obviously, Seagate has the right touch for optimizing access patterns, because the Momentus 7200.1 dominates all I/O related benchmarks. What we found particularly interesting is that fact that this is valid for both the SATA version as well as the UltraATA/100 model that does not have command queuing.