Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB SATA Notebook Hard Drive

Testing:

The system in today's tests will be a system build based on the Gigabyte X58 Extreme.  While this is not a laptop system, it does employ one of the best consumer SATA chipsets on the market; the ICH10R.  See below for the complete system specs:

For our benchmarks, we will be using both HDTach and HDTune, this time under Windows 7 build 7100.  As soon as Windows 7 hits the market in retail, I will be transitioning all bench testing to the new (and most excellent) OS. 

HD Tach: Full Bench, Variable Zones:

Impressively, the HDTach bench shows this diminutive drive pulling in some impressive numbers; in fact, it is right up there with many full desktop drives.  At the outer edge of the drive, we see read speeds just over 100MB/s, and write speeds at just under.  Of course, as we measure closer to the spindle, both write and reads drop to around 50MB/s. 

HD Tune Read:

HDTune is another excellent hard drive benchmarking utility, and we are using both the full read and write capabilities, at the default 64K block size.  In this case, the Momentus hit the below numbers:

Compared to our recent Momentus 5400.6 review, the 7200RPM flavor scored on average 21% better throughput. 

In terms of write speed, the Momentus performs equally well, with throughput ranging from 47.7MB/s to 93.6MB/s.