Seagate Momentus 7200.4 SATA 3Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive ST9500420AS

Another day, another hard drive review but this one is a 2.5” notebook drive, specifically it’s the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500gb hard drive. I’ve put it up against a couple 3.5” drives as I was curious as to how a notebook drive stacks up against a desktop drive.  let’s get into it…

Info:

Product Name: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 SATA 3Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive ST9500420AS

Author: Kristofer Brozio

Provider:  Seagate

Price: $64.99 (from Amazon at time of review)

Seagate Momentus hard drives deliver high capacity and performance along with innovative technology, such as self-encryption and free-fall sensors. If you require feature-rich, reliable, robust and secure laptop storage, Momentus drives are for you

Key Features and Benefits:
-Seagate SmartAlign technology provides a transition to 4K sectors without the need for software utilities.
-Seagate Self-Encrypting Drives deliver government-grade encryption without performance degradation—protecting your data where it lives. The FIPS 140-2 options are NIST government-certified for both U.S. and Canadian usage with sensitive data.
-Seagate G-Force Protection technology can detect when your laptop is in a free-fall, swing the drive heads to a safe zone and keep the data safe.

Specifications:
Model Number: ST9500420AS
Interface: SATA 3Gb/s
Cache: 16MB
Capacity: 500GB
Areal density (avg): 394Gb/in2
Guaranteed Sectors: 976,773,168

PHYSICAL:
Height: 9.5mm (0.370 in)
Width: 69.85mm (2.750 in)
Length: 100.35mm (3.951 in)
Weight (typical): 110g (0.238 lb)

PERFORMANCE:
Spin Speed (RPM): 7200 RPM
Average latency: 4.17ms
Random read seek time: 11.0ms
Random write seek time:13.0ms

The Review::

Hard drive are physically boring I think, they all look the same. On that note, here’s the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500gb hard drive:

 

Since I just reviewed the Seagate Barracuda LP, I figured it might be an interesting comparison to see how a notebook drive compares to a desktop one. I’ve also included the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 in the comparison.

The first test would be Atto:

  

Results would be in order of fastest to slowest:

Barracuda 7200.12: 133 MB/s Write and 134 MB/s Read

Barracuda LP: 102 MB/s Write and 101 MB/s Read

Momentus 7200.4: 92 MB/s Write and 104 MB/s Read

Not too good when compared to the 3.5” 7200.12 drive, but that’s expected I think.

 

Next test would be Crystal Diskmark:

  

In this test the Momentus seems to be better than the Barracuda LP, but just only.

Next up are a couple tests from SiSoft Sandra 2011:

File Systems

Benchmark mounted file systems (i.e. volumes).

This is not the raw disk performance that other benchmarks test – but the speed of the volume itself that depends on many more factors like file system, operating system cache, position on disk, etc. Thus this is the performance you get at the file system level.

Drive Score: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the average of the read, write, and seek tests, and file and cache size. It is intended to represent drive performance under typical use in a PC

As expected the Momentus falls behind a bit. I actually expected it to do better than the Barracuda LP since it only runs at 5900RPM while the Momentus runs at 7200RPM.

 

Physical Disks

Benchmark hard disks (i.e. the disk itself, not the file system).

As the test measures raw performance it is independent on the file system the disk uses and any volumes mounted off the disk.

Drive Score: is a composite figure representing an overall performance rating based on the highest read or write speed across the whole disk. Thus the higher the better.

Access Time: is the average time to read a random sector on the disk, analogous to latency response time. Thus the lower the better

Ah well.. the Momentus falls pretty far behind the other drives. These are 3.5” desktop drives though so it’s sort of to be expected anyway. Come back tomorrow for another 2.5” hard drive review so we’ll then see how they compare a bit better.

I did notice the drive doesn’t get very hot while in use, this is of course ideal for use in a notebook drive.

 

Conclusion:

For a notebooks drive the Momentus seems to do well, it has decent performance and stays cool under load. The drive also runs quietly as well, which is something you’d want for a notebook.

 

 

PROS	CONS
+Stays cool +Decent performance overall +Runs quiet	-Not exactly fast

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Scores::	9 out of 10
Overall:
Aesthetic:
Value / Price:
Build Quality:
Usability:

Disclosure:This product was given to Review the Tech for review by the company for review purposes only, and is not considered by us as payment for the review, we do not, and never will, accept payment from companies to review their products. This product may have also been bought by us for review purposes and does not influence the review.