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Seagate Momentus ST9500423AS
by TheGoodSurveyer
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=== Purpose of Purchase ===
I previously had my main notebook hard drive from Hitachi, which the Acer Aspire notebook came with. The hard drive worked fine for a number of years, before Windows 7 became available. Installing Windows 7 showed a few problems with the out-dated BIOS firmware, and the hard ... drive. I wasn't aware if the hard drive required resetting it as an MBR volume, and reformatting, or if the hard drive physically was unable to meet the demands of Windows. The Windows Upgrade Advisor was pretty useless as always, and showed no problems. I re-read the technical specifications and found it to have only eight megabytes of buffer, which clearly suggested it was too slow to keep up to the new operating system's demands. This resulted in the system completely freezing.
I was looking for a replacement, which would ideally have a thirty two megabytes buffer size. I wasn't successful in finding one with thirty two megabytes, but I did find a Seagate hard drive with sixteen megabytes buffer size. I was quite certain that if I replaced the hard drive; it would fix the system hanging fault, because I always saw the hard disk working very hard in Windows 7. The hard disk indicator didn't just flash regularly, it would stay on continuously until the system froze. The BIOS firmware wasn't related to that problem.
=== Purchase & Use ===
I compared the prices on many stores and sellers online, before I decided to purchase the Seagate Momentus for close to a hundred pounds, which was the best price at the time. The hard drive now costs half the amount. I installed Windows 7 on the new hard drive, installed all the drivers and used it for a while in trial mode to make sure it works before registering, because I only had a one PC licence and didn't want to waste it on a system that it may not work on.
Using Windows 7 for a few weeks, showed no signs of the previous problem- where the system used to freeze. I knew I made the right choice in purchasing the new hard drive, and with the new higher capacity I multi-booted the system with Linux.
=== Features & Comparison to the Hitachi HDD ===
When compared to the Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00, the Seagate Momentus has about a third the seek time, which gives the computer a much faster access to the hard drive than on the Hitachi. The buffer size is double and the capacity is much higher, which allows more storage, is better for multi-booting, and allows faster interaction between the hard drive and RAM.
The real performance difference for applications is the double data transfer rate, as compared to the Hitachi, which only has a hundred and fifty megabits per second. The Seagate Momentus has a very small difference in noise emissions, which is two decibels lower than the Hitachi. The Seagate Momentus has a twenty five decibel noise output during seek, and twenty three decibels while idle.
=== Current use ===
Although it's been a few years since purchasing the hard drive, it's still the main drive on my Acer notebook, and continues to give very good performance. I only defragment the hard drive monthly using Defraggler, which is sufficient to restore the hard drive's performance to its best. There are however some tasks, which put strain on the hard drive. This makes a temporary, but noticeable reduction in its performance.
I don't have any reason to upgrade the notebook hard drive to SSD right now, but I don't think technology will have much room for the old notebook in a few years' time. When that time comes; the hard drive can be used for backup and storage purposes.
=== Should you buy it? ===
If not for performance, the hard drive is quite cheap and is worth buying for additional storage on a notebook. On many notebooks it's possible to add extra internal storage, which there maybe space for by default, or you may need to take out the optical drive. The option of external storage is better in my opinion, because you can easily unplug the device and reduce power consumption. This is especially useful if you're operating a notebook in battery mode.
=== My Conclusion ===
This two point five inch hard drive is the best hard drive of its size I've purchased so far, and has shown great performance for everyday computing. A monthly defragmentation is good enough to ensure the hard drive is de-cluttered, and the performance is restored. Therefore, if you're looking to save money and invest in a good hard drive for a notebook, or for external storage; I recommend the Seagate Momentus.
I give it an average five star for performance in a de-cluttered Windows 7 environment, and top five stars for its performance in Linux. The Linux operating system start-up is roughly twice the speed of Windows, from cold boot, and very similar performance from a restart.
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Seagate Momentus XT STAN500200
by billyischilly
What is unique about the Seagate Momentus XT drive is that it uses both a traditional hard drive and a new-fangled Solid State Drive (SSD) to do its thing. Why? Large capacity hard drives are cheap but relatively slow when compared to their SSD counterparts, and unfortunately, for most people, large capacity SSD drives are currently ... prohibitively expensive. The Seagate aims to provide a third way - fast, high capacity drives for the budget conscious. Has it succeeded? Well, yeah!
I bought this drive to go in my late-2011 15" Macbook Pro, primarily to improve performance when using Logic Studio to make music. My previous hard drive was the stock 5400rpm drive that came with the Macbook and I had trouble with my music projects when they got beyond a certain size. I'm happy to report that I've not experienced any such problems since the upgrade, and have noticed several other improvements in general use.
The hard drive works by continually moving the most frequently used files to the faster, SSD portion of the drive. This means that the improvement to performance will largely depend on the computing habits of the user. Those who use the same applications every time they use their computer will notice the biggest improvement. I personally use my laptop for quite a wide variety of applications and so the performance of the drive is also fairly varied. Thats not to say that it is ever slow, just that applications that have been used recently, open a lot faster than those that haven't. For me, most of the time I have a hard drive that is fast enough for me to never think about how fast my hard drive is. Then occasionally, my hard drive is so fast that I notice how fast my hard drive is, and it is a pleasant surprise. An all-round, positive experience!
The only thing I would say is that unfortunately, it does not have some of the other benefits of SSDs. It is fairly quiet by most standards, but does a little hot and bothered when being used for gaming, video editing and other resource intensive stuff, although the performance in terms of speed and general snappiness remains very high.
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Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID Class HE502IJ 500 GB
by Seven17
Whilst recently upgrading my computer gear I decided to get a new hard drive, and chose on a Samsung one. Having bought from them before I thought it best to stick with a brand I know. I'll get the negative out the way which is that if you connect this as the main boot drive from your system startup you will be left with a drive loading ... screen for windows which takes an excessive time to load. I had a dell 2004 desktop with an old 60GB SATA drive which ran faster than this.
The drive is not slow when it gets going, when it finds and runs windows all is well but running windows 7 from startup with about 70GB free on the drive it took me 45 seconds just to load windows. This was nothing to do with viruses or malware dragging it down this was just getting from off, to the windows loading bar. Speed once running is great, documents save instantly, transferring large files can be done at 16MB per second running from USB 2.0 and files can be transferred, compressed (zipped) without running it down in speed.
The drive is built very well, it has a hard casing and the disk itself is robust and (thank heavens) does not wobble about in the slightest. I pushed down on the disk and there is no give in the centre, or edges. The screws are quite small but are fastened securely so they don't accidentally pop out. Installation was a snap, if you don't know what you're doing take it to a PC shop they can sort it for you.
The drive has never deleted or wiped data and has never "lost" files somewhere, and then been unable to find them. The drive can instantly access files in small clusters but accessing a folder with about 250GB worth of files such as MP3's takes time, around 40 seconds to load them all fully, top to bottom. Clicking on them and getting them to load in a media player is done instantly.
Overall a great high quality drive, it's been a pleasure to use on the desktop, easy to install but not a pleasure to use when loading windows 7. This thing really does like to take its time.
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