The New Seagate Barracuda 7200.10

My Laptop (model/brand: ZT Affinity PC, by ZT Group) came with a 100GB 5400RPM SATA Hitachi Travelstar hard drive.  In it, I have Windows XP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 installed as a dual-boot. Needless to mention, the system originally came with Windows Vista Home Premium Edition installed, but I wiped it clean to install and use XP and Linux instead. I use my laptop primarily for school related work: write exams, produce assignments, write programming, etc. On Windows platform, I only install the necessary application software for that purpose, such as MS Office 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Adobe Photoshop CS2. With this laptop, I have upgraded a few things. I replaced its original 512MB RAM with a pair of 1GB RAM. In my mind, I know that the only thing left to improve the laptop is a faster hard drive.

My recent photo shoot trip back in the summer this year prompted for a faster hard drive; it seemed that trying to upload my photo images from a CF card took up to hours. Even though these images are pretty large in the order of 25MB per image, it should not take that long. My initial impression was that there was a bottleneck with the system and that was the hard drive itself. So I decided to get a 7200 RPM hard drive offered by Seagate.

The Momentus 7200.1 SATA (150Gb/s) 100GB

The Seagate Momentus SATA-I hard drive was among the first laptop hard drive (geared towards a mobile workstation as claimed by Seagate) to offer 7200 RPM spindle speed; other companies such as Fujitsu also introduced laptop hard drives with this new technology.

The Momentus 7200.1 SATA is available in 60GB, 80GB and 100GB. This is obviously the first generation of Seagate Momentus laptop hard drive featuring a 7200 RPM spindle speed that uses SATA-I (1.5Gb/s) interface that was introduced back in 2005. Seagate has introduced its second generation (7200.2), featuring the new SATA-II (3.0Gb/s) interface with storage capacity of 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, and 200GB.

The Momentus 7200.1 is also available in P-ATA (IDE) interface, with a storage capacity of 40GB, 60GB, and 80GB. However, it seems that the 7200.2 is not available in the P-ATA interface. Heck, new PCs and Laptops are moving towards the SATA technology anyway; and therefore, the SATA interface is the common trend (or soon will be).

Installation

My laptop is pretty easy to perform a hardware upgrade (or maintenance) with good hardware layout. But I think it is quite the general feature for virtually all laptops; with hard drive, CPU and heatsink, RAM, CD/DVD-ROM drive accessible for removal underneath the system unit (under the laptop, that is).

My ZT Affinity PC laptop has a compartment for the hard drive placed at the lower right corner (underneath the keyboard). I simple unscrew a couple of screws, reomve the hard drive cover, slide out the old hard drive, unscrew the four screws that secure the drive on the tray, remove it; put the Momentus in the tray, and perform a reverse procedure as I did when removing my old hard drive.

I like the SATA connection interface compared to the old IDE one. The unit basically slides in to make connection. But I also think my ZT Affinity PC was made easy for this procedure as well.

On the first boot-up, I went into the system's BIOS to make sure the unit got detected by the system. I needed to do that any way, since the Momentus is new and requires a fresh installation of operating system. This time I decided to install Windows Vista Ultimate along with Fedora 9 Linux. I use both Linux and Windows; it is my common practice to have a dual-boot system.

With a dual-boot, it requires a good planning to set up the partitions; and with a hard drive of small storage capacity (100GB with only 93GB usable space), it even requires a more careful planning. I suppose even with a single boot you should set up the partitions carefully with at least two, one for the operating system and the other for storage. For me, I booted the system into Linux first to prepare the partitions, as Windows Vista does not offer much flexibility for partition preparation compatible with Linux.

It is surprising to say that I have to set up six partitions: 3 primary and 3 logical. The first two primary partitions are for Linux boot (118MB) and swap (1024MB) partitions; the third is for Vista Ultimate (38GB); the first logical partition is for the Linux root (/) with 14GB, the second logical partition (12GB) is for Windows and Linux to share files, the last partition makes use of the remaining storage space (~ 31GB) for data. I don't really use my laptop disk space to permanently store large data. Therefore, the available 31GB of storage is fairly enough.

After partition preparation was done, I went back to boot into Windows Vista to install the operating system. After checking for all proper hardware configuration, etc, I then moved on to install Fedora 9 Linux. For a dual-boot, it must be done in this order as Windows does not recognize Linux partitions. If Linux is installed last, its boot loader (GRUB) can configure and manage a dual-boot menu very nicely so that both system can coexist.

It is good to say that all went well for this nice hard drive. Vista installation took a reasonable time (less than 30 minutes, even though I did not quite time it). Linux took slightly less time since I mostly did a custom install with less software packages.

Performance: Real-World Usage and Benchmark

Windows Vista Ultimate booted rather quick on this hard drive, roughly 23 seconds, measured from the time immediately after the system locates the partition and starts loading, not when the power button was pressed; with a dual-boot, it's rather easy to see how the operating system boots and how long it takes. The Hitachi Travelstar takes about 39 seconds to boot Windows XP. Assuming that Vista Ultimate is larger than XP Professional, booting from the same hardware (with roughly the same hard drive configuration and devices), I think the Seagate Momentus, with its 7200 RPM, reads faster than Hitachi.

It should be noted that fast boot does not really imply a generally fast or faster overall performance. Thus, a comparison between the boot time of Vista on Seagate Momentus and that of XP on Hitachi Travelstar does not really tell me much. It's the general performance on a daily basis that should be considered instead. Needless to mention, my workstation at home configured with fast SCSI hard drives with spindle speed of 15000RPM (15K) and access time of 4 ms, fast dual-core CPUs and large RAM, takes about 40 seconds to boot Windows Vista Ultimate. The reason it takes longer to boot is because it has more integrated components to initialize during booting, and so forth. However, on a daily basis, working on large files, this awesome system is lightning fast with unparalled responsiveness.  

Now, back to the Seagate Momentus, while on the laptop system, from my user-experience standpoint, the Seagate Momentus seems to yield a fast response when launching application software (there seems to be less lag from the time an application is launched and ready for use, compared to my Hitachi Travelstar) from a general performance on a daily basis. Yet, I sometimes feel that its 7200 RPM spindle speed does not improve much from the 5400 RPM. I was expecting a large leap of performance. Uploading images from CF card is a bit fast, but doesn't seem to be that fast. Thus, overall, the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 with its 7200 RPM spindle speed does not seem to be that much faster than the 5400 RPM hard drive at all.

Unable to verify this from a human standpoint, I decided to conduct a software benchmark. It should be noted that the method here is still not consistent, since I ran SiSoft Sandra XII on Vista and SiSoft Sandra XI on XP; but presumably both does not differ much from each operating system. [I could install Vista on my Hitachi to perform the test, but I did not see any much benefit in that... except wasting time].

Bechmark: Seagate Momentus 7200.1 SATA (7200 RPM) 100GB

SiSoft Sandra2008 (XII): Windows Vista Ultimate [Vista partition (38GB)]
Drive Index: 38.57 MB/s
Buffered Read: 61.43 MB/s
Buffered Write: 75.16 MB/s
Ave Read: 45.25 MB/s
Ave Write: 49.88 MB/s
Access Time: 11 ms

As indicated above, the disk yielded a buffered read of 61.43 MB/s. Its sequential read/write (44.19/44.05) speeds were identical.

SiSoft Sandra2007 (XI): Windows XP Professional SP-2 [XP partition (17GB)]
Drive Index: 31.00 MB/s
Buffered Read: 92.00 MB/s
Buffered Write: 37.00 MB/s
Ave Read: 50.67 MB/s
Ave Write: 31.33 MB/s
Access Time: 14 ms

The above results indicate that the Hitach Travelstar 5400 RPM hard drive delivers good read speed; no wonder I could not tell much difference between the two hard drives on launching applications. Of course, the Seagate seems somewhat faster (but not noticeably fast). However, the story has turned completely around on write speed. Now wonder I felt the Hitachi Travelstar hard drive took almost forever for me to up load my photo images onto my laptop for temporary storage. Writing larger files took less time on the Seagate Momentus. One important criterion is the access time. In this scale, the 11 ms (milli-second) is faster than the 14 ms.

Actual data transfer rate (writing speed):

To compare real-world performance of my Seagate Momentus 7200RPM 100GB and Hitach Travelstar 5400RPM 100GB, I transfer a large folder consisting of some 2,938 items with a total file size of 2.45GB from a DVD-R medium disc read off the laptop DVD-ROM drive. Both my Seagate Momentus and Hitachi Travelstar has similar partition table (since both are configured with dual-boot). The 2.45GB folder is placed in roughly the same location (in the last partition ~ 31GB). I basically perform a regular read/write trasnfer and record the time each storage device takes to store the data.

Data chuck/size: 2.45GB (from DVD-ROM drive)
Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM 100GB: took 463 seconds to write.
Hitachi Travelstar 5400 RPM 100GB: took 599 seconds to write.

Here, by dividing the data by the time in seconds, it can be found how long each drive took to transfer (and write) data onto the device. The obvious fact here is that the Seagate Momentus can store (write) data about 23% faster than Hitachi Travelstar. However, the read speed of the Hitachi Travelstar is somewhat faster based on the benchmark result reported by SiSoftSandra, which seems to confirm from my daily usage; though there still seems to be a noticeable lag between launching an application and the time it is ready for use, which I think is due to its access time of 14ms. With Seagate Momentus things seem to be a bit more responsive.

Reliability and General Usage:

The Seagate Momentus is generally quiet during operation, though I can still hear a soft faint sound during booting and most large file transfer, but comparitive much more quiet than the standard SATA desktop hard drives. However, my Hitachi Travelstar is also quiet in this regard. In terms of heat, during long hours of use, both hard drives get a bit warm, but not seriously warm to cause any concern. Considering there is no fan to blow on the device and it is confined in a closed compartment without air cirulation, the warm operation is definitely a good sign that the device is not overheating.

Warranty:

I have had Seagate Momentus for just a bit over 3 months; and during this period, I have never had any problem with it. Things seem to work right on my first install from hardware to software. I had used Hitachi Travelstar for about a year before I replaced it with the Seagate Momentus for a regular use; it too never had any problem. I still use the Hitachi by switching it back and forth.  

Seagate Momentus carries a 3-year warranty. If the device is defective, it can be returned for an exchange. I have done this with Seagate once with my SCSI hard drive, and the process was quite straightforward hassel free. However, the returned/exhanged item will be a recertified one.

In general, Seagate hard drives are quite reliable. Thus, for reliability, I think Seagate Momentus  should offer good reliable services for years to come.

Conclusion

In terms of data transfer-rate performance, the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB is definitely not the type of SATA hard drive that sets a good standard or common trend in the SATA technology (even though it is based on SATA-I). In other words, it does not deliver transfer rate that is expected of the standard desktop SATA hard drives that are generally in the range of 80MB/s or so.

However, if we consider that fact that the device only draws much less power (~2.4 Watts) compared to the standard desktop SATA drives.


Seagate Momentus is now available with its third generation (7200.3) with storage capacity ranging from 80GB to 320GB.