Seagate momentus 5400.3 review

Tim Danton October 7, 2009

£119

Price when reviewed

Click on the picture to see a closer image of each hard disk. The Seagate momentus disk is marked with the number 6.

While you can usually expand your desktop PC’s storage space by adding a second hard disk, notebooks offer two big obstacles: there’s almost certainly only room for one disk inside the chassis, and transferring the data is a pain. You’ll have to either back up your files to a CD or DVD, or buy an external 2.5in hard disk caddy (we test six next month) and then fit your old hard disk inside. You then just transfer your data when you’ve installed Windows on your new disk.

But the effort is undoubtedly worth it. The biggest benefit of upgrading your hard disk is greater capacity, but you should also notice a speed boost. You’ll see from the results on the feature table that the new hard disks offer similar levels of performance, but we also tested a four-year-old hard disk for comparison: in disk-intensive tasks, such as our Photoshop benchmark, the new disks were 15 to 20% faster. And although a 20% boost may not sound much, it could be the difference between a smooth-running machine and a jerky one.

Performance matters

There are three main factors that influence the speed of a hard disk: its areal density, the amount of memory buffer and its rpm – the number of times the platters revolve per minute. But this is all theoretical: what we really care about are the speeds the hard disks achieve in our tests. Following our usual real-world methodology, we use a notebook as our testbed. It uses a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo T2300 with 512MB of 667MHz DDR2 memory.

Our first set of tests is for sustained transfer rates (using HD Tach RW, www.simplisoftware.com). The 7,200rpm disk was quicker than the rest, but to see this effect in real life you’ll have to be reading from a large file that was written contiguously on the disk (that is, the individual bits of data that make up the file lying sequentially next to each other).

A more practical test is for read-and-write speeds, and we test using both small and large files. The full results are on the feature table. We also run our full suite of application benchmarks, but there proved to be little variation: all the new disks scored 0.77 overall, compared to 0.74 for the four-year-old disk.

But this doesn’t mean you won’t see a difference in real-world use. To demonstrate this, we focus on the Photoshop test that’s part of the PC Pro benchmarks. This is hard disk intensive, as it involves holding more than 30 high-resolution photographs in memory at one time, causing the notebook to frequently call on the page file.

Reviews

Toshiba is one of the leading names when it comes to hard disks, with its 0.85in drives powering many consumer electronic devices. On this occasion, however, its 2.5in offering – the Toshiba MK1234GAX – failed to stand out from the crowd. Not only did it take the longest time to complete our Photoshop benchmark, it also came bottom in the more theoretical sustained transfer rate test. Even though it clambered its way to mid-table in our read-and-write tests, this drive is only worth considering if you can find it for £80 or less.

The Fujitsu MHV2120AH is immediately more appealing due to its price and its availability. Sold through such mainstream outlets as PC World and costing a reasonable £97 exc VAT, few people will be disappointed if they need to buy a drive in a hurry. However, it proved to be an unexceptional performer: only the Toshiba was slower at completing our Photoshop benchmark, and the Fujitsu’s read speeds were among the slowest here.
The Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 is the only 7,200rpm drive here this month, and it immediately showed its pace in our tests. Not only did it top our sustained transfer rate table, scoring 43MB/sec compared to the next highest score of 36MB/sec, but it carried through this theoretical pace into our real-world tests too: Photoshop completed in 404 seconds, 7.5 seconds quicker than its nearest rival.

There’s no power-consumption penalty either; in fact, Hitachi claims lower power consumption than many 5,400rpm drives. Instead, the area you pay the price is per gigabyte of storage – this 100GB drive costs £8 more than the 120GB Samsung. It’s also not the quietest disk on test, although not by so much that most people will notice.

We’ve long been fans of Samsung’s desktop hard disks, and the Samsung SpinPoint M60 Series didn’t disappoint. Some of the best news is in its cost: £89 is the lowest price here, and thanks to its 120GB capacity – for the model we tested, the HM120JC – that translates into a wallet-friendly 74p per gigabyte.

It isn’t quite as remarkable when it comes to speed, ending up in the middle of the pack in almost all areas of testing. For example, 414 seconds in our Photoshop test is slap bang between the Hitachi’s 404 seconds and Toshiba’s 423. However, it’s a good choice if you’re after a quiet hard disk: its claimed sound output of 26dBA will be barely audible even in the dead of night.

The only reason it doesn’t walk away with a Recommended award is the Western Digital Scorpio, which is even quieter. You’ll have to place your ear right up next to the Scorpio at 3am in the morning if you want to hear it search for data – truly remarkable. It isn’t the drive to choose if you’re after the fastest performance, though, as it generally found itself in the middle of the pack in our speed tests. That said, it managed to claim second place in our Photoshop benchmark, taking 412 seconds on average to complete our demanding set of photo-editing tasks.

This leaves one drive: the Seagate Momentus 5400.3. It may be the most expensive disk here, but as you’re buying 160GB of storage instead of the more common 120GB it still works out joint-cheapest per gigabyte; namely, 74p. Seagate achieves this extra density by using perpendicular recording technology (rather than the more standard longitudinal), which it’s claimed will eventually increase storage densities by up to ten times.

This leads to a higher areal density, which in turn helped the Momentus to the fastest score in our sustained transfer rate tests at 36MB/sec – for a 5,400rpm drive at least. The 7,200rpm Hitachi managed 43MB/sec and, more importantly, the Travelstar was also 3% faster in our Photoshop benchmark.

Where the Seagate Momentus loses out to Western Digital’s offering is noise, but only those of a sensitive disposition should be put off. Upgrade your notebook to a 160GB Momentus and not only will you get that promised speed boost, you’ll also get a quite phenomenal amount of storage.