[Xavier]

Seagate introduced the industry's first 320GB 7,200RPM drive for notebooks today. Dell XPS notebooks will be the first to get the new Momentus 7200.3 drive.

What would you do with 320GB of speedy storage in your notebook?

Here's the press release Seagate sent me earlier this week:


Seagate today announced that its Momentus® 7200.3 hard drive, the industry’s first 7,200-rpm, 320GB hard drive for mobile computing, now powers Dell XPS laptop PCs and will be available soon in select Alienware laptops – making the leading computer manufacturers first to market with systems featuring high-performance 320GB hard drives. “Laptop users want every bit of capacity, performance and durability that desktop PCs deliver,” said Michael Wingert, Seagate executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business. “The new Momentus 7200.3 hard drive exemplifies Seagate’s focus on delivering leading storage technologies that make it easier to move, use and protect digital information in the home, in the office and on-the-go.”
Perfect for performance laptops, workstations and small form factor desktop PCs, the Momentus 7200.3 hard drive for on-the-go workers and consumers combines the industry’s lowest power consumption, free-fall protection and industry-leading performance. Seagate’s new 2.5-inch hard drive delivers up to 320GB of capacity and combines a fast Serial ATA 3.0 Gbit/second interface with 7200-rpm spin speed and a 16MB cache to enable the highest-performance laptops ever. The drive also is offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology, to help prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity, then parking the head off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as eight inches.
The Momentus 7200.3 hard drive is designed for a wide range of systems including mainstream notebook PCs, workstations, and small form factor desktop PCs. Offered in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 250GB and 320GB capacities, the 2.5-inch drive also is perfect for users looking to upgrade their notebooks to deliver true desktop PC performance.
The entire Momentus series is built tough to withstand up to 1000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration. The hard drives are also lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate’s innovative SoftSonic™ fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep™ ramp load technology.

[ChrisTheFeral]

*drools on keyboard*

All I have to say is wow! FINALLY! We can have 640gb (RAID) at 7.2k rpm!
I'd probably store some HD movies (if I got the dragon :P) wow... I got a huge library of music too, if I were yo use them as SATA, maybe I can have one as an exact copy if I had 2 of the drives.

[Larrabee]

7'200RPM drives become more and more popular for notebooks. Hard drives are mostly a bottleneck for most notebooks. 320 gigabytes are a lot of space,
imagine if you combine two of them in RAID 0, you can get 640GB! Seagate is doing well last months!

[SmileyXX]

*drools*

Now thats awesome. I could finally have mass storage on my laptop and be able to carry around my entire music collection without having to carry along my external hard drive. Plus its made by Seagate so its a good drive to being with not to mention the nice warranty that Seagate has in case anything happens to it. Nice mass storage, great company, great warranty...definitely can't go wrong there.

[ChrisTheFeral]

Originally Posted by SmileyXX

*drools*

Now thats awesome. I could finally have mass storage on my laptop and be able to carry around my entire music collection without having to carry along my external hard drive. Plus its made by Seagate so its a good drive to being with not to mention the nice warranty that Seagate has in case anything happens to it. Nice mass storage, great company, great warranty...definitely can't go wrong there.

I like Seagate, I have one of their external drives. Apparently a harddrive in the Columbia disaster that occurred back in February '03 survived an was found in the debris! I don't know if that was due to the casing, but STILL! It was a big fall!

SEAGATE FTW!

[DeAnnaCochran]

I am more eagerly anticipating the cost of SSD drives to come down, right now they are $600+ for 30 GB or so. We're talking sub 30 second boot times for XP, full shock tolerance, etc. Spindle based HD's will soon b a thing of the past. Even if you could load your OS on a SSD, and use a SATA drive for data, you would see huge performance gains. At this point, read/write performance is lagging behind processor and memory performance and will soon be the biggest bottleneck on PC's.

[ChrisTheFeral]

Originally Posted by DeAnnaCochran

I am more eagerly anticipating the cost of SSD drives to come down, right now they are $600+ for 30 GB or so. We're talking sub 30 second boot times for XP, full shock tolerance, etc. Spindle based HD's will soon b a thing of the past. Even if you could load your OS on a SSD, and use a SATA drive for data, you would see huge performance gains. At this point, read/write performance is lagging behind processor and memory performance and will soon be the biggest bottleneck on PC's.

Whats the difference between the SSD's and the MicroSD's apart from size? Is it the speed? because MicroSD is still pretty fast and 32gb cards are coming out VERY soon and are about $150 or less... gah, to many choices

[Shan Gee]

Originally Posted by ChrisTheFeral

Whats the difference between the SSD's and the MicroSD's apart from size? Is it the speed? because MicroSD is still pretty fast and 32gb cards are coming out VERY soon and are about $150 or less... gah, to many choices

SSD's are used to replace the whole computer hard drive, and they come in large capacities. Micro SDs come in smaller capacity, and they are obviously small. They do not replace the computer hard drive, they're mainly used for storing camera photos/videos or documents. Micro SDs are actually way cheaper than SSD's!

[ChrisTheFeral]

Originally Posted by Shan Gee

SSD's are used to replace the whole computer hard drive, and they come in large capacities. Micro SDs come in smaller capacity, and they are obviously small. They do not replace the computer hard drive, they're mainly used for storing camera photos/videos or documents. Micro SDs are actually way cheaper than SSD's!

Here is where I get confused, they are both flash memory, is the MicroSD lower in quality or something?
Isn't smaller generally better for laptops, they must be using SSD over MicroSD for some reason - quality?

[Shan Gee]

Originally Posted by ChrisTheFeral

Here is where I get confused, they are both flash memory, is the MicroSD lower in quality or something?
Isn't smaller generally better for laptops, they must be using SSD over MicroSD for some reason - quality?

As I mentioned in my post, Micro SD has less capacity than SSD! They're used for two completely different purposes. SSD is built to replace your entire hard drive, and Micro SD is built for storing small media like camera pictures/videos.