Seagate Momentus 5400.3 ST9160821A 160 GB

...5 year warranty again so Seagate must be reasonably happy with its expected reliability although that doesn't mean you shouldn't back up your data regularly.

There may be faster drives or less power hungry ones out there but for the money, I'd say this Seagate offers a good balance of capacity, performance and price that makes it an interesting option for anyone in need of a new 2.5inch hard drive. The only thing that stops it getting ... more

My laptop, a Dell 5150 is a fine machine (see review elsewhere on Ciao) but the 80Gb hard drive whilst big for a laptop is starting to get a bit cramped now I have both Windows XP and Vista on it so I've started looking around for a second hard drive so I can put Vista on one and leave XP on the other and then swap drives as needed. Luckily, following a previous hard drive failure, I have a spare caddy that the laptop needs so swapping drives would be a quick task, assuming I keep the tiny screwdriver needed handy in my rucksack!

Laptop hard drives are smaller than normal - 2.5inch as opposed to 3.5 inch and tend to be at a price premium compared to the 'normal' sized drives, especially the bigger ones. They also tend to be much slower as they run at 4200RPM instead of 5600 or even 7200RPM that desktop ones run at. The reason being battery life - if you're spinning it faster, the battery life will suffer, badly.

After a quick search I came across the Seagate. The capacity is huge compared to most laptop drives at 160Gb. This is as a result of a fairly new technology called perpendicular recording which allows the drive to write data vertically in the disk magnetic layer as opposed to across it. This gives the possibility for much more storage space than traditional non perpendicular drives. The price was also ridiculously cheap (that or I've not being paying attention to 2.5inch drive prices recently). If I'm honest, I was also unaware that perpendicular recording had made it to laptops so there was an element of the 'new and cool technology' in the buying equation.

The drive spins at 5600RPM which ought to make it quicker but it should also be quicker still because of the perpendicular recording meaning that for every revolution of the disk, more data should be flying past the read heads.

Installation

The drive arrived in the standard plastic anti-static bag that drives always arrive in. Installation was simply a case of fitting it to the cradle I already had (4 small screws hold the drive in the metal framed cradle) then sliding the cradle in to the laptop and fitting the two screws that hold that in place.

I then switched on the laptop and happily, the drive appeared fine in the BIOS. It was then 'just' a case of installing Vista and the job was done.

I ran a few basic speed tests and the drive is certainly much faster than the old 4200 RPM one but then it ought to be! It has a huge (by 2.5inch drive standards) 8Mb cache which also helps the speed. On average, it benchmarked a little over 50% quicker than the older drive. Going from 4200 to 5600RPM will account for some of that but I suspect the rest is the cache and maybe a bit because of the new recording system.

It's also nice and quiet but most laptop drives are anyway.

I've had it running for a few weeks now and power consumption seems on a par with the 80Gb drive although with two different operating systems, each with different power management strategies, I can't be too precise on this area. I'm certainly not feeling it's draining the laptop too quickly. Given that it's quicker and bigger, I'm happy with 'more or less the same' in the power consumption stakes.

Finally, a word about the warranty. Hard drives traditionally came with 5 year warranties. Then, a few years ago, manufacturers started to quietly drop back to 1 year warranties. Around the same time, many drives started to fail prematutely. A connection? Hmm... Anyway, this drive has the full 5 year warranty again so Seagate must be reasonably happy with its expected reliability although that doesn't mean you shouldn't back up your data regularly.

There may be faster drives or less power hungry ones out there but for the money, I'd say this Seagate offers a good balance of capacity, performance and price that makes it an interesting option for anyone in need of a new 2.5inch hard drive. The only thing that stops it getting 5 stars is that it's not THE fastest drive around.
 

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