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Seagate 7,200 RPM drive provides performance and high storage capacity

When it comes to notebook computers you have to give up something’s for the sake of power savings and portability. Typically this means slower processors and lower performing hard drives. For most users this isn’t an issue, but for gaming notebooks low performance is a big deal.

Seagate announced that Dell and Alienware will be the first notebook makers to ship notebooks that use the Seagate 320GB 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch hard drive. Dell is currently offering the hard drive in its line of XPS notebooks and Seagate says Alienware will be shipping systems using the drive soon.

The Momentus 7200.3 hard drive is available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB and 320GB capacities. Seagate only introduced its higher capacity 250GB 5,400 RPM hard drive in January and wasted no time with the faster high capacity drives now shipping.

Seagate says that the hard drives have a 16MB cache and are offered with G-force protection that allows them to withstand up to 1000G of non-operating shock and 350Gs of operating shock. The drives are able to sense acceleration greater than that of the force of gravity and can lock the drive heads during a fall of as little as 8 inches to prevent contact with the disk platters. The interface for the drives is the Serial ATA 3 Gbit/second.

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External
By DonkeyRhubarb on 5/20/2008 3:07:38 PM , Rating: 2
Would be nice if there were some external 2.5" drives. I have a Western digital passport and its great, but would be good to get the 7200 speeds in there.




RE: External
By livinloud on 5/20/2008 3:28:58 PM , Rating: 4
Just buy an external enclosure, and put this drive in it. Cost lost, and you can choose whatever you want to put in it.


RE: External
By Ender17 on 5/20/08, Rating: 0
RE: External
By JoshuaBuss on 5/20/2008 5:22:44 PM , Rating: 2
sorry, more like 480 mbps, 30MB, and 20MB, respectively. still not gonna be a problem though


RE: External
By JoshuaBuss on 5/20/2008 5:25:19 PM , Rating: 2
what? usb 2.0 maxes out at 480 mbps, where 7200 vs 5400 will mean a difference between ~30MB/s and ~24MB/s or so.. USB isn't going to be a bottleneck here.


RE: External
By SiliconJon on 5/20/2008 7:57:41 PM , Rating: 2
Agreed, the difference even in a USB enclosure (so long as 2.0+) will be well noticed and received.


RE: External
By jester700 on 5/21/2008 8:00:15 AM , Rating: 2
In theory, yeah - 60MB/s. But in practice, less than half that. IIRC, one test had it around 25MB/s - so you might not see much of a speed increase going to 7200RPM in this app.

That's from memory of a couple years ago when I was buying external enclosures (and went w/ firewire because despite a lower 50MB/s theoretical speed, it tested better in the real world test). Maybe newer chipsets have improved this...


RE: External
By Starcub on 5/21/2008 11:12:16 AM , Rating: 2
Yeah USB is a bottleneck. However, most peopple who would buy a drive like this are likely running it with a performance laptop that likely has esata ports which eliminate that bottleneck. In addition, dual esata port Express Cards are fairly inexpensive and allow the external drives to be RAID'ed.


RE: External
By Klober on 5/21/2008 12:25:45 PM , Rating: 2
Does no one think about the fact that it's not just transfer speeds that increase with spindle speed, but access times improve as well? Even if the data bus (in thise case USB) is maxed out with the 5400RPM drive you'll still see and feel the difference in responsiveness.


RE: External
By Zoomer on 5/21/2008 7:44:46 PM , Rating: 2
I pretty sure just about no one would run an app / their OS off a drive connected with USB if they were concerned about performance.

Besides, using USB for it would add about 1ms to seeks.

Source: http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=240...


Sounds cool
By HaZaRd2K6 on 5/20/2008 3:05:45 PM , Rating: 5
Just hope they won't be running hot enough to melt your laptop, as some drives I've seen have in the past.

Also, if "the interface for the drives is the Serial ATA 3 Gbit/second," then why do you have a picture of an IDE drive up there? ;-)




RE: Sounds cool
By bryanW1995 on 5/20/08, Rating: 0
RE: Sounds cool
By daftrok on 5/21/2008 2:05:27 PM , Rating: 2
PWND! Nice catch.


G-Force Protection?
By TemjinGold on 5/20/2008 5:36:41 PM , Rating: 2
Read that as "GeForce Protection" for some reason. Fancy that...




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