Now, let’s examine the newcomer itself. Launching its new product, Seagate had to make sure it would be the best or at least up to a certain mark: the Momentus will have to put up a fight to hard disk drives from Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba.

The drive comes in two capacities – 20 or 40GB (that’s the size of our sample). Physically, it means the drive uses one 40GB platter and one or two read/write head(s). The spindle rotation speed is 5400rpm, this value becoming a de-facto standard for 2.5” form-factor models. The default buffer size for Momentus drives is 2MB; an 8MB buffer comes as an option (our sample was one). In the latter case, the drive performs much faster in a variety of tasks. The interface supported is Ultra ATA/100.

As for technical features, the Momentus took up all the best from its elder brothers. Well, it wouldn’t be right to give up the innovations that have proved their efficiency and usefulness in 3.5” drives. The good acoustic characteristics of the drive are mostly due to the SoftSonic motor with fluid dynamic bearings and a special technology called “QuietStep ramp load”. The latter serves a number of purposes. First of all, it diminishes the noise level. For example, it makes imperceptible the clicks occurring when the drive is waking up from the energy-saving standby mode. The acoustic characteristics are improved by flexible control over the speed of loading/unloading the read/write head(s). Second, “QuietStep ramp load” increases the reliability of the hard disk by using an effective parking method. The heads in the Momentus drive are parked off the outer side of the platter rather than off the inside.

A special design helps the drive go undamaged through an accelerative force of up to 225G in operational mode, which corresponds to the notebook falling down on a hard surface from a height of 3 inches. When the notebook is shut down, this parameter is 800G, which equals the fall from a height of 18 inches.

Energy-saving technologies couldn’t be done without as the Momentus is targeted at notebooks. Seagate claims the new drive consumes the same amount of energy as slower, 4200rpm drives.

The drive also features the exclusive 3D Defence technology. The three “D” are:

• Drive Defence is based on the combination of “QuietStep ramp load” and G-Force Protection technologies.
• Data Defence secures the data stored on the disk by using the error correction code on the fly, by returning the head to the same sector when the power was turned off (Safe Sparing) and by continuous background defect scanning (CBDS).
• The last “D”, Diagnostic Defence, consists of the diagnostic software called Sea Tools Suite, Web tools for solving technical problems over the Internet, the S.M.A.R.T. technology and the enhanced drive self-test (NDST).

Just like any other drive from Seagate, this one comes in a plastic case that protects against physical damage and electrostatic discharges.

Unfortunately, we cannot yet say how much the drive is going to cost. However, our guess for the 40GB model with a 2MB buffer is somewhere about $150. At least, this is the average price for competitor products of similar characteristics. The 8MB buffer will add about $15-20 to the sum.