Thankfully, this will take place automatically with the 750GB Momentus, without even bringing in outside software to check alignment. Generally speaking, users won’t see this type of performance on a system unless it hasn’t been properly aligned from the start. Once random transfers are introduced, the 512-byte alignment transfers show the weakness of the 4k drive. With 4k-alignment there was very little change. Everyone else competing here is the cream of the crop for mechanical drives, and of special note is the Momentus XT hybrid drive.Įven without sending 4k-aligned packets, the Momentus performed very well with its 2MB sequential read and write speeds. Since the 750GB Momentus is a 4k drive at its core, we’ve also included 4k-specific tests here in our comparison to get a feel for how it should perform in a system once properly aligned. Comparing results between the two gives us a better understanding of how the drive might perform when we take it for a spin in our real-life benchmarks. We run our synthetic tests using a combination of CrystalDiskMark and IOMeter, primarily the latter though the former is used to help tease out a complete picture of the drive’s potential performance. Removing the board reveals a vibration isolation and thermal dissipation pad, design to draw heat away from the LSI controller.ĭisassembling the Momentus 750GB (within reason, we don’t have a clean room handy) reveals its 16MB drive cache from a Winbond W9412G61H-5 and an LSI B6650B controller chip that we can assume houses the SmartAlign firmware. The circuit board on the Seagate Momentus 750GB hard drive is held on with seven fine-pitch Phillips head screws. The nice thing is that they’re able to cram 750GB worth of capacity into a drive without negatively affecting the size terabyte notebook drives are often slightly taller (12.5mm vs 9.5mm) and thus less apt to fit in most notebooks. They aren’t reinventing the wheel here, so its pretty run of the mill compared to other notebook drives on the market. Seagate takes the standard white label and silver body approach with the 750GB Momentus. Capacity – 750GB unformatted / 715GB Formatted.Seagate claims this negates the potential performance decrease that can occur with an Advanced Format drive, and today we’ll put it to the test. The onboard nature of SmartAlign is unique, the other 4K drives we’ve tested to date all require installed software for realignment. SmartAlign is firmware that works completely internally on the drive and is transparent to the operating system, dynamically managing read/write/modify commands within the drive without having to worry about anything on the OS level. So what’s a manufacturer to do? Well, if you’re Seagate, you cook up SmartAlign.
We’ve seen the use of Advanced Format incur a minor but nonetheless measurable performance decrease while also potentially introducing driver-based headaches in the host operating system. Making the jump to Advanced Format allows for improved usage of platter capacity, but it runs into snags with operating systems that weren’t designed to operate with hard drives running sectors greater than 512 bytes. The Seagate Momentus 750GB sports 7200RPM spindle speed, but is also an "Advanced Format" drive, meaning drive sectors are 4K in size instead of 512 bytes. That leaves advances in technology to pick up the slack.Īnd indeed they do. Here, you’re stuck with two platters, period. Try to remember that while desktop drives are breaking the 3TB mark, they’re also doing it with as many as five platters, and those platters are substantially larger than what you’ll find in a notebook drive. Users discontent with the comparatively miniscule capacities and oftentimes prohibitively high costs of solid state drives may yet find something that can produce satisfactory performance with a mechanical drive while being able to store a staggering amount of data for such a tiny notebook drive. Enter the 9.5mm 750GB Seagate Momentus, a 7200RPM Advanced Format drive with onboard alignment. Platter density continues to improve, and with it comes faster sequential speeds and higher overall drive capacities.
Solid state technology has been improving at a rapid clip, but mechanical drives aren’t stagnating either. With all the talk about SSDs around here it can be easy to forget that notebook users have another, oftentimes preferable option: good old-fashioned mechanical hard disk storage.
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