Seagate unleashes new Momentus laptop drives

    Just recently, I had the pleasure of discussing the new generation of Momentus hard drives from Seagate.  If you don't know, the Momentus is Seagate's laptop line of disk drives, and the new product line is denoted by the 5400.4 moniker.  The 5400.4 boasts densities of up to 250GB, second generation perpendicular recording, as well as a native SATA 3Gbps interface, resulting in a substantial performance increase over the 5400.3.  Seagate's internal testing of their new hard drives show that the performance is on par with the Samsung 250GB drive, and seriously outclassing other 2.5" drives from Fujitsu, Hitachi, Toshiba and Western Digital. 

  So what is the driver behind the demand for more capacity in laptops?  It appears that more and more consumers are moving away from the traditional desktop, which requires notebooks to take over tasks that it is not accustomed to, and that includes data storage.  Seagate expects notebooks to overtake desktop in terms of units shipped by 2011.  This means most of our data will have to be portable as well.  Given that gross margin for notebooks is greater than desktops, that makes for a huge market potential.  To capitalize on this potential, Seagate plans to have 1TB drives available in the 2.5" form factor by 2011, with 600GB drives comprising a large share. 

  That doesn't mean Seagate is putting all their eggs in one basket, however.  During the interview, I inquired about the effects of SSD as well as hybrid hard drives, and Seagate made it clear that they were ready to pounce on both potential markets within the year, including dropping some hints about an SSD drive geared towards the performance market now dominated by the Raptor. 

  The hybrid drives promise to leverage the advantages of both the SSD and convential spinning disks, with the new drive giving about 60-80% of the performance benefits of a pure SSD, with NAND Flash content reaching about 1GB. 

  Finally, Seagate plans to launch Barracuda drives with native data encryption, meaning that data security will be achievable with only a small performance penalty.

  Who said hard drives are boring?  Turns out 2008 will be an exciting year for storage.

Seagate 250GB Momentus 5400.4 Details

Key Features and Benefits

• Industry’s most reliable hard drive with proven second-generation Seagate perpendicular magnetic recording technology
• SATA 3Gb/s interface with Native Command Queuing, the fastest interface option available today, to enhance system performance levels
• Sustained data rate: 806 Mb/s
• Power:
  • Seek: 2.0 watts
  • Read: 2.0 watts
  • Write: 1.6 watts
• 8-MB cache
• 56 percent areal density increase from previous product generation
• Robust design and high shock tolerance enable mobility in rugged operating environments.
• 325 Gs of operating shock tolerance and 900 Gs of nonoperating shock tolerance make the drive ideal for notebook PCs and industrial applications.

Applications

• Mainstream laptops
• Workstations
• Gaming systems
• Small form factor PCs
• External boxes
• Non-mission-critical blade servers