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. "

Wewt

[Kawahee]

Well it looks like I'll be able to buy one of these for my external USB HDD interface. This technology has applications everywhere, although I think hard disk drives are about to go boom and then bust, as evidenced by the 500gb beast we just saw on /., up from a 300gb HDD. +200gb in a few months? We need a Moore's law for HDDs.

How much heat do these drives produce?

[CyricZ]

How much heat do these drives produce? I had a laptop with a 60 GB drive, 4200 RPM, and it would heat up like a mutha.

120 GB...

[Zweideutig]

I like advances in technology as much as the next person, but I really wonder, what do you need 120 GB in your laptop for? I am only using about 2 GB on my laptop (Slackware install, Firefox, and some notes I take in vim.) On my Mac Mini with a Debian install with Firefox and XMMS, I am using only 2.5 GB of my 40 GB HDD. On my 3.8 GHz P4 FreeBSD server, with Apache, and about thirty mp3's served over NFS, as well as NetBSD sets over FTP, I am only using 4 GB of the 80 GB HDD. My NetBSD router of course suffices with a 1 GB HDD. What do you do with a 120 GB HDD? I realize I don't download any other than source and mp3's to my HDDs, but still, why would I want 120 GB? I think 120 GB HDDs should stay in servers, not that I even need one here. THe only use I see for this is for web hosting and e-mail storage.

Re:How the hell much music can people use?

[plumby]

At the moment 120 would probably be more than I need, but I will more than fill up my 60GB player when I've finished ripping my CDs. The 41-83 days thing is a bit of a red herring TBH. I'm not planning on sitting down and listening to my entire collection from beginning to end, but I have it on random most of the time and it's great to have that much variety for it to chose from. Also, when I go on holiday, it's handy not to try to guess up front what music I'm likely to be in the mood for during the trip.

Re:120GB MP3 Player

[plumby]

I can pretty much guarantee you wouldn't do it in one go. I completely reloaded my mp3 player with around 45GB of music (via USB 2) the other week. It got so hot that I ended up doing in about 4 stints (I think it was around 1-2 hours actual copying time, but it took me around 6 hours in total).

Reliability

[Walterk]

These large sizes are all good and well, but 120GB is a lot of data to lose. In these mobile application areas, how does the reliability stack up? Can it withstand some battering, or does it fail first time you drop your laptop?

laptops LBA48? Availability?

[v1]

Here we are at the edge, at 120gb. What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD? I have had headache after headache with desktop systems and firewire enclosures that were not fully LBA48 compliant, and so they would detect 160, 180, 200, and 250gb HDs as 128gb. (or not at all...) Since no laptop drives > 128gb have yet been manufactured, I wonder if we will see this problem crop up sometime next year for out laptops?

Or has someone tried cabling a large 3.5" drive into a few laptops to see if we have a nasty surprise waiting for us?

I've got an 80 in my powerbook, and have a good 20 of it free, but y'know how things like that go... I'm sure I'll be hurting for space by start of next year. A 120 would be a nice upgrade. Anyone found a source for these new magic drives? I remember years back with my black powerbook with its "huge" 8gb drive, finding that IBM had made a massive 23 gb drive and having to search high and low to find the ONE retailer that had just TWO of them in stock. I still say I should have bought both and ebayed the other and made a killing.

If someone has found a few sources for them, can you report back on prices so we know how bad it's gonna sting? (that 23 was over $800 at the time, but worth every penny!)

Re:Reliability

[bunco]

I don't know about you, but any data loss is a bad thing regardless of the amount lost. Anyone who doesn't back up critical data from their laptop on a regular basis can expect a disaster. They're portable and therefore much easier to drop, lose to theft, etc. Expect your laptop HD to fail at some point and plan accordingly.

I recommend an external firewire/usb2 drive hooked up to a docking station. Better yet, chain it to your docking station. I've heard horror stories of stolen laptops where the "backup drive" was in the same case of the laptop (oops).

Re:How the hell much music can people use?

[Zakabog]

This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?

I dunno, I'm looking at winamp right now just to check how many days worth of music I have. About 35 right now (842 hours.) It's all full albums and stuff I want to listen to. I usually go on Direct Connect, find someone with a fast connection on my favorite hub, see if they have the same musical interest (hardcore, grindcore, heavy metal, punk) and download all their full albums. It's not fun organizing, renaming and re-tagging 13,101 files but it's nice having a massive collection of music for road trips (Alpine 6 CD MP3 compatible changer with the head unit, so that's 7 full MP3 CDs I can have.) It's all organized very nicely and most of my friends can just come over and name a song and chances are I have it.

I have 780GB total on my computer and if I was into maintstream music I'd have a much much larger MP3 collection (and much more hard drive space.) When stories like this one come out people ask "WHY! Why all this space!" Well when someone comes to a lan party and they've got a TB of hard drive space, and half of that is games, movies, porn, music, whatever you want, those people forget their question completely. I'd hate to have to keep changing CDs (or DVDs) to copy files to other people, which is why I just love having all the space I have. I'd deffinitely buy the 120 GB hard drive for my laptop (I only have a 40 right now and I have about 6 gigs free, most of the large files are from photos or apps and I've had to delete a lot of stuff or move it.)

Re:How the hell much music can people use?

[NanoGator]

"This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?"

I think most would agree that once you start getting that many songs, having to weed out a bunch to make room for new music sucks. For music, 120 gigs is practicaly infinite. Although, I think it'd be pretty hard core for somebody to find 40 gigs (just for music, most of these HD based mp3 players are neat little external drives, too...) to not be enough for music, but 120 gigs would be. Heh.

The thing is, though, there are some neat little doohickeys out right now that would benefit from having that much giggage. Archos, today, has a handheld device out that plays MPEG 4 files. It even has a little cradle so it'll act as a PVR. Unfortunately, that's upwards of $800 for the 80 gig model. When that comes down, boooooy will I be tempted. You can even hook it up to a TV. Neat stuff. Then again, I'm seriously hoping an iTunes for series of TV shows is somewhere on the horizon.

Re:How the hell much music can people use?

[QuaZar666]

use an external firewire drive for the extra storage, its not like you are going to need all 250GB at all times.