Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB Notebook Hard Drive

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB notebook hard drive proved to be overall faster than the Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB hard drive, although the benchmark results were interesting. It seems that the Momentus 7200.4 500GB has without a doubt improved read scores, but the write scores seemed decreased in some benchmarks. The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB hard drive was shipped to LR and tested using firmware 0002SDM1, which is said to be much better than the older firmware versions that shipped with the 7200.4 drives in March/April 2009. While the drives write performance may not show performance increases across all the benchmarks over the 7200.3, the Momentus 7200.4 hard drive is still very fast.

If you are hard on your notebook you might want to search for a drive with G-Force Protection as it will increase your chances of not losing data in the event that your notebook is dropped. This is made possible due to an optional drop sensor that senses when the system is in a free-fall state, moving the heads off the platter and locking them in placeall within three-tenths of a second. This is a pretty neat little feature that not many people know about, so if you are upgrading an old hard drive it is something to look into if you like trying out new things.

When it comes to storage space the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB hard drive had a free capacity of 465GB as shown above. With nearly 465GB of storage space for your applications and media files, it should take you some time to fill up this drive. Is should be noted that the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 hard drive series uses 0.67W at idle, which is less than the the 0.75W needed by the 7200.3 hard drive series.

When it comes to pricing, the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB hard drive can be found online for $139.99 shipped, but they are tough to find as nearly everyone is out of stock right now. At $139.99 that means you are paying $0.28 per Gigabyte for this hard drive. Other 500GB notebook hard drives like the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 500GB can be found for ~$60 shipped right now from Hewlett-Packard. This is a sale price, but means that you can pick up the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB for $0.12 per Gigabyte. Sure, the WD Scorpio Blue is only 5400RPM and 20-26% slower in the read/write tests in HDTach, but it costs 57% less than the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB hard drive. With many consumers tightening their budgets this might be a tough sell for many. On the other hand if you want the newest and the fastest hard drive that Seagate has to offer the Momentus 7200.4 500GB hard drive is the drive for you.

Legit Bottom Line: The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB hard drive is slightly faster than the previous generation of 7200.3 hard drives, but faces fierce price versus value competition with other 500GB that are slightly slower and half the price.