Seagate Momentus

I am hoping to replace my achingly slow Fujitsu 5400rpm drive with a seagate mommentus 80Gb 5400rpm drive. Benchmarks suggest this drive does very well, beating some 7200rpm drives in benchmarks and anihilating my old drive.

Does anyone have a seagate mommentus? Is it a quick drive in every day practical use?

Thanks

 

I would suggest not bothering upgrading from one 5400 RPM drive to another. If you really want better performance, save up a little more and get a 100GB Hitachi 7k or something along those lines.

 

What performance problems are you experiencing? Seek problems? Or copying lots of large files? If it's seek issues, you won't see much gain from 5400->7200. If it's just moving large files around (or reading non-trivial files), then you will. Have you defragged regularly? Run a complete filesystem scan? If it's working around errors invisibly, it could be slowing some performance.

And ajfink, the 160GB 5400RPM perpendicular recording drives (like the Seagate she describes) actually do match the performance of the 7200RPM drives of smaller capacity, mostly because the heads have to physically move less distance to get to the same amount of data. If you can get 160GB at very similar performance, and sometimes lower price, than 100GB, wouldn't you?

 

Yes, I agree.

 

In terms of comparison, the Travelstar 7K100 is probably one of the better 7200 RPM notebook hard drives out there. I have the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 notebook hard drive and it is quieter than the 7K100 while still being very quick. The seagate momentus you are talking about is the 5400.3, which uses perpendicular recording to achieve performance levels very similar to the 7200 RPM notebook hard drives with only the heat/power/noise levels of a 5400 RPM HDD. That particular model is the 5400.3 series. Like I said, many reviews will show that the Momentus 5400.3 is very similar to the 7200 RPM HDD. The Momentus 7200.1 is actually 7200 RPM, and is quieter than the Hitachis. The 7200.2s will be out soon, but there is very little differenc ebetween the 7200.2 and 7200.1 other than the fact that the 7200.2 can go up to 160 GB and has 16MB cache. Other than that I have yet to find any differences.

 

i have a momentus 5400.3 on my laptop (120GB) and it performs quite well. i've attached my HDtune benchmark

 

My problem is my system getting locked up because my hard drive is taking ages to read stuff. This is mostly in games but also switching applications, downloads.

As I said, my current hard disk is amongst the lowest performing drive on the toms hardware benchmarks. As the seagate is near the top for reading and writing would it not be a good investment? I really can't afford a 7200 rpm drive right now they are so expensive.

 

Jess, I would worry about getting a 7200 or 5400RPM hard drive. Just so long as it isn't any slower than either of those (i.e., 4200RPM = ) you are going to be just fine.

Look for low seek and access times, and don't get anything with less than 8MB of cache.

 

How much free space have you got on the current HDD? The upgrade makes more sense if you also need more space. 120GB costs little more than 80GB (but this 80GB 7200 looks to be good value, when it arrives).

Also, in addition to defragging with a good defrag software, I advocate having more than one partition, with less frequently needed material moved to a partition with a higher letter, where transfer rates are slower.

Finally, for now, I am a strong believer in setting up a fixed size swap file straight after installation of Windows, so that it is one contiguous block near the fast end of the HDD. Letting Windows resize the swap file results in it become fragmented. Once Windows wants to use the virtual memory, dumping existing RAM will delay reading anything new into RAM.

John

PS: You might want to also look at the Samsung HDDs. I put one in my computer. It is almost as fast as the Momentus, is slightly cooler and quieter, and a little less expensive.

 

As John said, Samsung is very close to Seagate in terms of acoustics/thermals while being slightly cheaper. I would still stick with Seagate though

 

I think they are all about the same in terms of acoustics and decibel levels. They all range about 23-26 dBa in sound.

 

Some HDDs sound like pecking chickens. When I got my Samsung HDD I was surprised how silent the head movement was, compared with the Seagate HDD it replaced (and Seagate HDDs are relatively quiet). More here, which explains why the Samsung HDDs are slightly behind the fastest.

John

 

I think this would be a good move. Firstly I am running out of space here, I have 6Gb free now which isn't a huge amount. Sure there are some games on here that I don't use that I could easily uninstall but a lot of it is downloads and documents, pictures etc. I'd like to keep a hard backup of my downloads, documents and pictures etc. so using the old current HD as external would make sense.

Can you tell me more about swap files? What they are, why they are useful, how big they should be?

To get 100Gb or 120Gb over the 80Gb would cost an additional £11 per 20Gb. The 80 is around £36, the 100 £47 and the 120 £57-59. As the 60+80 would more than double my current size I don't see the need for more than 80Gb.

Also I am very wary of partitons after what happened last time I used partition magic! So I probably will leave the disc as one big disc.

I presume it is possible to put a brand new hard disk in the laptop and install windows straight on it? Windows installation program can 'initialise' the disk?


Edit: does anyone know where I can find a usb 2.0 SATA 2.5" external hard drive enclosure/caddy in the UK that isn't extortionately priced?

 

1. Only 6GB free. That helps to explain the poor performance.

2. The swap file is the virtual memory. My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance > Advanced, and down at the bottom of the page. By default, Windows dynamically varies the size of the file according to need. The challenge is to think of a big enough value which doesn't fill your HDD. A total of physical RAM + virtual RAM between 2.5GB and 3GB is probably about right. You can get an idea by opening up and running all your favourite applications and looking at the Commit Charge at the bottom of the Task Manager window. The first number is RAM in use and the second is total RAM available.

3. You have clearly done your homework on the prices. Do you need IDE or SATA?

4. Partitioning. OK, Once bitten twice shy as the expression goes.

5. Yes, the Windows installer can format an HDD. You would probably benefit from a clean install, otherwise cloning software (eg Acronis MigrateEasy) and an external HDD caddy would let you clone the existing HDD, but that is another cost.

John

 

1. That's 10% but it's always had these accessing problems even when there was 35% free or more!

2.

Here's my swap file window thing. What should I do to it?

3. I need SATA, hence the enclosure question. Strangely dabs.com has the 7200.1 80Gb momentus for just £1 more than the 5400.2. Strange. I'll keep an eye on that. None in stock though!

4. Quite. Partition magic had an 'error' and I lost around 150Gb of pictures, videos, music, downloads and other data acrued over 3 years. Totally unrecoverable.

5. I will certainly do a clean install from a windows disc rather than the recovery disc, that's if I can get access do an xp pro sp2 oem disc as I don't own one. I will then install drivers, set swap file, install any games I want and then other applications. I will then move all my files from the old drive to the new drive with a usb 2.0 enclosure. Once I am sure the new drive is ok and working well i will put the old drive back in the laptop and zero it. swap the drives again and re-copy my relevent files on to the old external drive as a hard backup.

Good plan?


Edit: I have found some SATA enclosures on ebay for around £13-15 inc. postage. The really cheap ones are all IDE at the moment though.

 

Re: 2. I would fix the swap file at the upper limit of the recommended range. I expect on your present HDD the swap file will be fragmented and the Windows defragger complains if there isn't 15% free.

Re: 5. The recovery CD that you had should work on a new HDD. It is not to know that it is a new HDD and not the original HDD which has been reformatted. Somewhere it will check for the right brand of computer.

Keep an eye on the Scan todayonly offers. Sometimes there are good prices, but Scan's delivery isn't cheap.

John

 

Scan? I'd rather go with dabs as I know they're nice and fast and reliable!

I won't be using a recovery CD, I'll be using an xp pro sp2 oem cd if i can get my hands on one (with my own product key of course) so I don't get all the bloatware.

 

I just bought the Seagate 7200 100gb hard drive off of newegg.com. It just arrived at my house so I have to wait till the weekend when I drive back home from school. I'll let you know how it is.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html?modelx=33&model1=425&model2=414&chart=139

This website I found it really helpful cuz it has the benchmark for almost everything about hard drives.

 

is this the 7200.1 Seagate you are talking about or the 7200.2 ? either way, I have the 7200.1 that came with my T60, and I love it. Definitely is quieter than the 7K100 from Hitachi, even with the 7K100's AAM enabled (the seagate does not support AAM, as Seagate has seemed to have done so since the days of the 7200.7 Barracudas).

 

My hitachi is loud.
But I dont really care I dont shop based on noise at all. Really noisy is ridiculously quiet compared to the bad old days.

I shop based on the best product ignoring noise.

 

Dabs are good - I don't think I have had any bad experience with them. I got my last HDD from PCnextday because they were the first to get a 160GB SATA HDD in stock. They also have very reasonable delivery charges. However, they don't stock Seagate notebook HDDs.

As an alternative to finding an OEM XP CD (and the possibility that it won't work with your key) you could try using nLite to build your own install CD. nLite should let you chuck out the bloatware and add in the service packs and updates to XP plus the latest drivers for your hardware. This will give a smoother installation with less fiddling around afterwards and reduced clutter on your HDD caused by superseded files.

John