Conclusion

This test session poised more questions than it gave answers. Yes, the new hard disk drive model from Seagate’s Momentus 5400.2 series deserves our attention as a product with fundamentally new characteristics like a storage capacity of 100 gigabytes, but on the other hand, its performance raises our doubts. Particularly, this device’s Business Disk WinMark score is higher than its High-End Disk WinMark score in WinBench 99 – that’s a most unusual thing for a hard disk drive. The new Momentus was also slow in FC-Test, except read operations. Considering that the Momentus 5400.2 is head above the others in the Business Disk WinMark parameter, we might expect it to have an advantage in other tests, too.

So, we suspect some firmware flaws as the main reason for the low speed of the Seagate drive in some cases (as mentioned earlier, we tested a pre-production sample). We will certainly check this hard disk drive model once again when it comes to market in mass quantities – we will try to learn the truth about the new Momentus because the majority of the results we got today do not match the level of technologies Seagate had implemented in this new device.