Scotts Valley (CA) – Dell and Alienware have begun offering Seagate’s new flagship notebook hard drives. The third-generation Momentus 7200 drives are now available with up to 320 GB capacity.

Since the introduction of its 160 GB perpendicular hard drives more than two years ago, Seagate seemed to almost have lost contact to all other large hard drive manufacturers which have been driving the capacity train. The company trailed the announcements of its rivals, claiming that it is introducing new capacity ranges when the market is actually showing demand: While it is clear that Seagate still controls the market with a 33.9% share according to iSuppli, new drives have been introduced by the competition – especially by Western Digital, Hitachi GST, Fujitsu and Toshiba.

But Seagate has reclaimed the lead today in the performance segment of 2.5” drives. At least in the 7200 rpm market, Seagate is currently offering the broadest range of drives and the largest capacities. The Momentus 7200.3 is available in 1-disk configurations with 80, 120 and 160 GB versions and in 2-disk models with 250 and 320 GB. If you are looking for pure capacity and don’t care about the platter rotation speed, Hitachi GST has still an edge with a 500 GB 5400 rpm model.

According to Seagate, the Momentus 7200.3 consumes about 2.1 watts during read/write and 2.3 watts during seek processes.

Dell and Alienware are the first system builders to offer the new drives. A 160 GB 7200 rpm drive sells for a $75 premium over a standard 160 GB 5400 rpm drive in Dell Inspiron and XPS notebooks. The $250 GB rings in at an extra $250. The 320 GB option was not listed by Dell/Alienware at the time of this writing.

 

Your title sounds like an oxymoron

May 20, 2008 03:54     

speedy hard drive
lou report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -1

combo drives?

May 20, 2008 09:10     

It would be great to see a combo drive that has the best of both SSD and HDD. It would have the 'first' drive be a SSD and the 'second' drive be the HDD. The first drive would be the boot drive since it is faster and the second drive be the data drive since it holds more for less. :)
TomLeeM/BigWarpGuy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

What's the performance?

May 21, 2008 09:23     

And what's the performance numbers? Why did you leave those out? Also, you wrote 'The Momentus 7200.3 is available in 1-disk configurations with 80, 120 and 160 GB versions and in 2-disk models with 250 and 320 GB.' But should it be 1-platter & 2-platter. disk just doesn't sound right
GWolfman report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0