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Seagate Momentus 7000.2

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:56:26 -0600

Seagate wasn’t the first to the 7,200rpm mark, but that hasn’t stopped it from making the fastest hard drive around. The Momentus 7200.2 has a well-deserved reputation as the notebook hard-drive performance king. What you give up in space, you gain in speed—the Momentus easily eclipses the ginormous Western Digital Scorpio in read speed, access time, and all around zippiness. (Seagate has announced but not shipped a 200GB version of this drive.)

Although the Scorpio didn’t lag too far behind in average reads, the drive’s spindle speed kept its access time about 25 percent slower than the Momentus’s. The Momentus also had a 22 percent advantage in PCMark05’s application tests.

Certain Momentus models feature a G-Force Protection sensor that can tell if the drive is in free fall and quickly park the heads to avoid damaging the drive. While the sexy-fast Mtron SSD will grab the spotlight, the majority of folks looking to upgrade their notebooks will reach for either the Western Digital or Seagate models.

We lean toward the Seagate Momentus because of its speed advantage and killer five-year warranty. Its free-fall sensor also makes us feel warm and fuzzy about data integrity and seals the deal.

Western Digital WD2500BEVS Scorpio

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:55:26 -0600

Western Digital has pulled off a significant coup with its 250GB Scorpio notebook hard drive; the device is the current capacity champion. (Fujitsu has also announced a 250GB drive but has not shipped it yet.) Packing 250GB into two platters, the areal density of the Scorpio easily outstrips that of the other hard drive reviewed here—Seagate’s two-platter 160GB Momentus drive.

While 250GB isn’t impressive next to 1TB desktop drives, it’s more than enough to keep most notebook users happy. But to get that storage, you give up some performance. Though it didn’t post terrible numbers, the 5,400rpm Scorpio lags behind the 7,200rpm Momentus. The Scorpio trailed Western Digital’s drive by up to 22 percent in our benchmark tests. Access times were also off by 25 percent against the Momentus due to the Scorpio’s spindle speeds.

Don’t read this review as too negative though. The Scorpio isn’t pokey, it’s just that the Momentus is faster and the Mtron is in an entirely different league. But if you crave maximum capacity from a notebook drive, the Scorpio has that, while offering decent performance as well.

Mtron MSD-S25032

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:54:26 -0600

An early 16GB SATA solid-state drive from Mtron wowed us, but that was just the beginning. The company’s 32GB version of the drive slays all other contenders for the speed crown.

How fast is this bad boy? We put it up against a desktop Western Digital 150GB 10,000rpm Raptor for reference, and the 32GB Mtron MSD-S25032 flat-out smoked it. In fact, the only reason the MSD-S25032 isn’t the fastest hard drive we’ve ever tested is because it’s not a hard drive—it’s a solid-state drive.

So it goes without saying that the other two drives reviewed here, the Seagate Momentus and the Western Digital Scorpio, had no chance of touching the Mtron’s benchmark scores. You can read the scores for yourself and weep for disk-based storage. Average read speeds of 138MB/s—equivalent to those of a striped RAID—and a .1-second access time put hard drives to shame.

The access time is no surprise, as this drive stores data in nonvolatile flash RAM instead of the magnetic platters of a hard drive. This greatly improves reliability since there are no moving parts to crash, no bearings to wear out, and no delay while waiting for the head to seek. To test the drive’s durability, we repeatedly pounded it on a lab bench while we ran our benchmarks. That treatment would kill most hard drives, but the Mtron shrugged it off without even a performance dip.

In HD Tach, the Mtron’s average read speeds of 138MB/s blazed past the 48MB/s achieved by the fastest notebook drive we’ve tested, Seagate’s Momentus 7200.2. Even the desktop 10,000rpm Raptor (reviewed March 2006) can achieve only 92MB/s average read speeds. The MSD-S25032 produced similar results with HD Tune, achieving read speeds of 121MB/s.

We also used PCMark05’s hard-drive suite to judge real-world workloads. PCMark05 uses trace patterns to simulate the read and write loads that a drive goes through when booting Windows XP or starting Microsoft Word, the Mozilla browser, Acrobat Reader 5, or virus scan workloads. The MSD-S25032 crushed all other hard drives in these tests. We saw a healthy boost in our Photoshop CS2 test, as well, but no major gains in hibernation time or XP boot times. Perhaps the bottleneck is the OS?

Unless our benchmarks are lying to us, the MSD-S25032 is the fastest notebook drive available, achieving near RAID 0 performance with a single drive.

Despite the amazing performance, there’s an obvious shortcoming. Let’s face it, 32GB isn’t much capacity today. And the speed comes at an exorbitant price. The MSD-S25032 costs a whopping $2,000. (We’re told by the U.S. distributor of the drive, DVNation.com, that it should be in the $1,000 range very soon.)

Still, for those who need amazing durability and speed, the MSD-S25032 is a winner. Despite the sticker shock, with this kind of performance, we have no choice but to award Mtron’s MSD-S25032 high honors.