We have already introduced to you Seagate’s new hard disk drive of the 2.5” form-factor that belongs to the Momentus family (see our Seagate Momentus HDD Review for details). The drive features high spindle rotation speed and low power consumption, comparable to devices with 4,200rpm speed.

So, we liked the drive very much, but wanted to know how it ranked among other “notebook” HDDs now available.

This is the matter we are going to look into today. Besides the Momentus drive from Seagate, we took six other 2.5” hard disks from three manufacturers. Such devices are actually multi-functional. First, they can be used according to their main purpose – in notebooks. Second, they are becoming popular as mobile storage devices, too. Third, there is a clear tendency to miniature hard disk drives in desktop systems. If the tendency proves strong, we may see the old 3.5” HDD being replaced by its smaller 2.5” counterpart. The main difference between the two is… the size, of course! The physical size of the platter determines the capacity of the drive and notebook drives are more restricted here. Otherwise, HDD models with the UltraATA interface have much in common. They offer the same maximum speed (7,200rpm). As for the cache-buffer size, some small drives may surpass bigger ones (16MB against 8MB). So, keeping all these things in mind, let’s start the testing.

Hard Disk Drives Specifications