Seagate Momentus 120GB 2.5" HD

VL writes "A mobile user can never have enough storage space, so we checkout Seagate's latest solution for notebooks. Seagate's warranty is among the best I've seen at five years, which is much better than the one year or so that comes with laptops (and thus their hard drives) or the three years offered by others. Performance is what this drive is targeted to excel at, an it seems to do so fairly well. In our tests we saw it do markedly better than the Hitachi drive in most tests that focused on performance. Battery life was slightly lower than that of the Hitachi drive but within 2% of that drive. "

Biased review

[LynXmaN]

Comparing two 4200rpm drives against the Seagate running at 5400rpm will always make the Seagate a winner.
It'll become a second natural that a drive spinning faster will consume more energy, even if it's just a bit more than this drive.
I'm not saying this Seagate drive is excellent (reading the specs it really makes me drool) but maybe benchmark testers should do tests with some more "au pair" drives.

Movies

[68k geek]

TV shows and movies - I filled up 3 hdd (80GB + 60GB + 14GB) real quick, even with burning older stuff to DVDs.

Can never get enough space if you like video.

Re:Fascinating!

[CyricZ]

You realize this is news, correct? This is a site that does attempt to inform the readers about recent events (such as the release of this hard drive). Maybe it's not the most exciting news, but nevertheless it is still news.

Even though we know there will be new releases of the Linux kernel in the future (just as we know hard drives will have larger and larger capacities), it is important that such news be posted about here, so we can be alerted to the developments.

Re:Fascinating!

[m50d]

Maybe it's not the most exciting news, but nevertheless it is still news.

News that isn't exciting is just stuff that happened. I wrote an email today, does that qualify as news?

Re:How the hell much music can people use?

[Transmogrify_UK]

I travel fairly often and have a pretty extensive music collection on record and CD (around 1000 CDs and about half that of records). I personally like to have ALL or as much of this music with me whenever possible. My MP3 player is only a 20 gig Creative Zen, however I would like a larger capacity player, simply because I could then store all or most of my music (should I get round to ripping it all).

When I do travel, it tends to be for months at a time rather than a couple of weeks and so it's not practical carrying 1000 CDs and 500 records.

It's not about listening to 40 days continuous music but having the music to hand.

Currently I know there's always going to be a time when I want to listen to a particular song or band and I don't have it with me. Had my MP3 player had a 120 gig hard drive, then I know I could take all my music with me.

Re:120 GB...

[r2q2]

You have obviously haven't heard of bittorrent or other peer to peer file sharing applications.

Re:120 GB...

[TeknoHog]

My laptop is my music workstation. That's currently the main reason why I like space on a laptop drive. People have different uses for computers, so be wary of generalizing your usage patterns on others.

Besides, I hate the articifial distinctions between servers/desktops/laptops etc. that have nothing to do with their actual capabilities. Particularly Windows users treat computers as limited appliances. With unix, it's easier to see that a computer is a computer is a computer, and you can use almost any machine for any use. In fact laptops make great servers as they come with a built-in UPS.

I think 120 GB HDDs should stay in servers

Yeah, and 120 GB ought to be enough for everyone ;) I mean this as a reminder of the point that you shouldn't impose arbitrary limitations on how technology should be used, because people will always find uses for new inventions.

Re:120 GB...

[toddestan]

There are two types of computer users in this world. Ones that see the computer as a movies/music/media station, and those that see it as a word processing/spreadsheet/email/internet station. For the former, a 400GB drive is too small, and for the latter, a 40GB drive is more than they'll ever need. You clearly are in the latter group.

Firewire vs. USB

[Donny Smith]

And before you know, your 120GB drive will be full. And it's not cheap either.

To me, capacity and performance are more important that disk dimensions and weight. That's why I'll get myself a Firewire (faster) enclosure with a 3.5" disk (cheaper) three times the capacity.

Re:Biased review

[GeffDE]

Not necessarily true. Most laptop drives that one can purchase only run at 4200 rpm for the reason you state: they consume less energy. What is remarkable about the Seagate drive is that it runs at 5400 rpm while maintaining a similar energy consumption to a 4200 rpm drive. Its more hard drive bang for your energy buck.

Re:How the hell much music can people use?

[bokmann]

Its not about music.

I am a software developer who does a lot of travelling, so I use a laptop. I also work on a lot of different projects, and the source code bases can be HUGE.

Recently, I started using VMWare. I can better isolate my development environments for each project from each other by having them exist in different virtual machines - I can also back them up and create 'snapshots' much easier. But it consumes a hell of a lot of disk space. On one project alone I have a windows XP, 2 different flavors of linux, and Solaris 10. I have all of that on an external 100gb drive.

120 gigs? That's nice. I want a laptop with 250 gigs. I know I'm not the norm at this point, but I don't think I'm more than a couple of years ahead of the curve.