Seagate (Finally) Unveils Momentus 5400.4 250GB Mobile Drive

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Seagate issued a press release yesterday announcing their new 250GB 2.5" drive, which led many to ask the question, "why?", and that's a valid one. Many other companies have already released 250GB drives, so what took one of the world-leaders in storage so long to release their own? During a phone-conversation last month, the simple answer I was told was, "we wanted to make sure we released the best drive on the market.", which they well could have. We won't know until reviews surface.

Introduced with the new drive is PMR 2.0 (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording), which is essentially a refinement of the original technology, so no new major features have been introduced. The Momentus 5400.4 drive includes two platters of 125GB each, 8MB of cache and S-ATA 3Gb/s speeds, making this only the second 250GB mobile drive on the market to support such speeds (Toshiba has the other).

Seagate claims to have the best 250GB on the market, and according to their internal testing, that seems to be the case. Where PC Mark 04's HDD test is concerned, Seagate's Momentus 5400.4 is above the rest, although its power in watts fell slightly behind Hitachi's drive of similar specs. Pricing for the new drive is not yet known, but it's expected to debut at around the $150 price range, alongside Toshiba's S-ATA 3Gb/s offering.


The Momentus 5400.4 hard drive is perfect for mainstream laptops, performance-hungry gaming systems, workstations and personal external storage. The 2.5-inch, 5400-rpm giant features 250GB of capacity on just two disc platters and, like the rest of the Momentus series, is lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges. And the drive is virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate’s innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology.

Source: Seagate Press Release