Seagate takes 7.2k notebook drives out back - and shoots them
Disk-only gear killed, clears way for flashy mutants
A momentous moment: Seagate will end production of its Momentus 7,200rpm 2.5in disk-only drives.
The storage giant will stop making the gear by the end of this year to focus on drives mixed with flash memory, although it will continue to pump out 5,400rpm disks for cheap laptops.
“We are going stop building our notebook 7,200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013,” David Burks, Seagate's director of marketing and product management, told X-bit Labs.
Seagate offers a Momentus 5,400rpm model and three Momentus 7,200rpm drive types:
- Momentus 5.4k dual-platter: 120GB to 500GB capacity
- Momentus 7.2k dual-platter: 500GB to 750GB
- Momentus thin single-platter: 160GB to 500GB
- Momentus XT second-generation hybrid drive: 500GB to 750GB plus 8GB SLC flash cache
Typical laptop drives spin at 5,400rpm - so 7,200rpm is at the high end of Seagate's notebook disk tech.
WD has its 10k Velociraptor plus its ordinary 5,400rpm Scorpio Blues and the Black hybrid drive with a 24GB NAND cache added to a 500GB or 1TB drive spinning at 7,200rpm. HGST has 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm Travelstars but no flash hybrids.
Toshiba has MK and MQ notebook drives spinning at 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm: the MQ1ABD-H is its first 5,400rpm hybrid drive that can store 750GB or 1TB, and has 8GB of NAND.
The drive suppliers reckon the notebook storage market is trifurcating into fast, fat and, er, something in between.
High-performance and svelte notebooks need solid-state disks. Fat notebooks need relatively big disks of 750GB to 1TB, or more. In-between machines need both attributes: speed and capacity, and one way to do that is with a slug of flash added to a pedestrian 5,400rpm disk drive or a nippier 7,200rpm model.
We expect Seagate to turn the Momentus 5.4k line into a hybrid storing 750GB, 1TB or more, with a fat flash cache of 16GB to 24GB. It could be branded a Momentus 5400 XT. A better bet is that the existing Momentus XT is going to get a third-generation refresh with a fatter flash cache, up from the current 8GB.
Will the pure 5,400rpm disk-only notebook drive product line go the same way as the 7,200rpm one? It most probably will in a year or two. ®
COMMENTS
Momentus decision
Sorry, couldn't resist
Mine is the one with the dictionary of bad punnery in the pocket
I have momentus XTs
And they're not much different to the non-flashy versions (4G SSD onboard)
Seriously, maybe a _little_ faster to bootup but overall effect is between 10-20% improvement over a bare HDD. Not the highly optimistic figures toted in some quarters.
The effect is even less noticable on a linux system, presumably because of the much higher uptimes.
As an experiment it was worthwhile but any future purchases will be SSD-only unless going into a highly budget constrained environment.
BTW, if you want 5400RPM with caching, then use ZFS. It works fairly well on my fileserver (low power and reasonable response time), but I have no idea (yet) how well it scales past 10 clients - but in any kind of "multiple simultaneous read access (classrooms)" it should go pretty well.
Sensible move.
The Momentus XT hybrids don't cost much more than their conventional 7,200rpm siblings and with the additional bang that buck provides, you'd almost be mad not to.
Can't see the 5,400's going hybrid. Having "cheap 'n cheerful" and "fast but pricier" options with clear air between them seems about right to me. Muddying the waters with a "faster but not quite that fast and only slightly cheaper" option would seem a bit silly.
Re:
HP laptops normally come with the crappiest HDDs ever. The IO performance is unbelievably bad.
That said, I ordered a 17" HP a while back and it came with one of the XT's with 8GB of flash, it outperformed any non-SSD hard drive I've had in a notebook before. The clients loved the upgrade in speed, and the huge amount of space.
The hard drives they put in laptops are despicable. What are the manufacturers thinking? Typical models may give you an expensive processor, motherboard, assloads of RAM, decent graphics, nice big screen... yet they give you the cheapest, crappiest models of hard disk to severely bottleneck that nice system.
When I buy a laptop for myself or a family member, I take the original hard disk right out and let it sit unused in case the laptop ever needs to go back under warranty. I install a nice Western Digital Scorpio Black 7200 RPM drive and it makes a big difference. I also use those for replacement drives for customers, if a laptop hard disk fails and it's worth fixing.
If Seagate is only going to make crappy drives, then they'll just make themselves easier to avoid.
