Introduction

There comes a time in the lap top life time when you will be looking to replace that hard drive of yours. Overtime the hard drive could wear out and you will start experiencing problems like crashing and blue screens. Let me tell you, no one wants to go trough the aggravation of recovering a lost hard drive as it is a painful and long process. It is highly recommended to change your hard drives every two to three years or at least reload your OS for a quicker response from opening and operating programs. Today we are going to be a taking a look at a replacement hard drive for your every day laptop, Momentus ST905003N1A1AS-RK. Momentus has been designed by Seagate as a replacement hard drive for your system. Lets take a closer look at Momentus and see if it is going to be a suitable replacement hard drive for our current system.

About the Product

Following information is taken from the Seagate website.

Applications

• Laptop computers

A boost built right into your laptop.

Roomy, quick, and quiet. That’s what you get.

• Up to 500GB capacity
• Up to 3GB/s data transfer
• SATA connection

The things you can’t see, but love to have.

Keeping your data safe and your mind at ease.

• Simple installation with award-winning DiscWizard software
• Easy backup with BounceBack Express backup software
• Self-monitoring technology checks data security and drive performance

Key Features and Benefits

• Built-in self-monitoring technology continuously checks for data safety and drive performance
• Whisper-quiet and cool operation
• Five-year warranty

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at Momentus.

Closer look

Front Shot		Rear Shot

Packaging of Momentus is very colorful and included vivid images of the actual unit inside. Newest seagate products come in a "green" design packaging but not this one. On the back of the packaging we found some helpful information about the Momentus. One thing that jumped out is the 5 Year limited warranty of this unit. If in the 5 years this hard drive stops working or there are problems, Seagate will replace it free of charge.

2.5" SATA		Description

Momentus is 2.5" hard drive with rotational speed of 5400 RPM. This particular model comes with 8 Mb cache. Seagate has another model which is faster and has a bigger cache 7200 RPM and 16 Mb cache to be exact. Momentus emits very little noise, the sonar specifications are not noted any where on the packaging but if I had to guess it would be around 17 dba.

Out of the box		Out of the box

Unpacking Momentus was pretty easy. It doesn't come with any cables or documentation. This unit pretty much is designed to act as a replacement hard drive for the laptops. Seagate internal packaging keeps the unit very secure while transporting. The actual unit is in the anti static bag and sourunded by a plastic mounts which hold hard drive in place.

Momentus 5400 RPM		SATA Connector

There is nothing special about Momentus as it looks exactly as you would expect 2.5" hard drive to be. Since this is an SATA hard drive we took a clear shot of the SATA connector on this hard drive as it matches to every 2.5" SATA connector out there.

Size comparison

For our testing purposes we are going to be using an older generation of Momentus from our own notebook. As you can clearly see both of the hard drives look identical in physical design. Let us take a closer look at the new Momentus 2.5" hard drive and see if it is going to be a good replacement for a 2 year old hard drive.

Testing

We are going to be using our Asus F8 Laptop. A little bit of a background history on this unit. This unit has been purchased for reviews and heavy graphics about two years ago. During the two year period we did not had any problems with the hard drive but the time it takes to open an application is taking a little bit longer than a new machine would. This unit has been our work horse for these two years and I feel like it is due for an upgrade. The hard drive in side is a 250 Gb Momentus 5400 RPM with 8 Mb cache. It is going to be a small upgrade as we use the new Momentus as it is 500 Gb in capacity.

The way we have performed these benchmarks is simple yet unique. We have used HD Tune Pro and HD Tach to perform the benchmarks on the old Momentus. When those have been completed we then cloned the hard drive to the new Momentus via Acronis. Once the clone has been completed we have repeated the benchmarks but only with the new Momentus. Here are the results.

HD Tune Pro Old Momentus Read

Unfortunately we cannot perform write benchmark with HD Tune as it requires a blank hard drive. The maximum speeds old Momentus was 60.1 MB/s and the minimum speed of 8.6 MB/s. The average read speed was 46.7 MB/s The access time wasn't all that impressive as we have gotten an 18.9 ms. The burst rate of the old Momentus was 101.2 MB/s.

HD Tach SATA Old Momentus

With HD Tach we have gotten an average read speed of 50.6 MB/s with access with of 15.7ms and Burst Speeds of 116.6 MB/s. Pretty close to the HD Tune if you ask me.

HD Tune Pro New Momentus Read

With the new Momentus the maximum speeds was 75.6 MB/s and the minimum speed of 15.3 MB/s. The average read speed was 57.9 MB/s The access time wasn't all that impressive as we have gotten an 18.2 ms and the burst rate of 79.6 MB/s.

HD Tach SATA New Momentus

Running HD Tach we have gotten an average read speed of 63.4 MB/s with 19.7 ms of access time and 118.9 MB/s of burst speeds. I definitely saw an improvement with the new hard drive. By looking at the data we can see that we have gained a little bit of speed with new Momentus. Considering this was a switch from a 250 Gb to 500 Gb hard drive the access time was pretty slow still. Both of these hard drives have 8 Mb cache as well.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a replacement for your current hard drive Momentus could be it. With the high capacity of 500 Gb Momentus makes a great impression on every day computing needs. The transfer speeds of Momentus are very much standard as they deliver a relatively fast access to the files. One thing we did found was a bugger was the random access time for these drives. Both going nearly at 20 ms doesn't leave an impression. Perhaps with the higher rotational speed such as 7200 Momentus would have quicker response time and transfer. The sonar levels of this hard drive are very low and could be barely picked up by a naked ear. If you are looking for a replacement, I would like to highly recommend Momentus. Recommended gear!

Some pros we found:

Low sonar levels.

Improved transfer speeds.

Some cons we found:

Slow random access time.