Seagate Momentus 7200.5 750GB Hard Drive Review (ST9750420AS)

PC Mark 7 & Real World Tests

PCMark 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

We are continuing to use the new PCMark 7 software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifically designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: Again, while the VelociRaptor posted better scores across the board, the Momentus was right there and fought the good fight although neither were near the SSD and hybrid drive.

5GB File Copy Tests

One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files. Using a free application called Teracopy, we copied large numbers of two file types from one folder to another on the same drive. Teracopy allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer and using the same drive prevents other devices from tainting the outcome. The operation requires the drive to perform both sustained read and writes simultaneously. The first set of files is a 5GB collection of JPG’s of variable size and compression levels with a few movie (.MOV) files thrown in for good measure since most cameras now take video as well as stills. The second is a collection of MP3 files of various sizes which totals 5GB collectively. These file types were chosen due to their wide use and mixture of file sizes and compression levels.

Install Results: Other than the boot test, this is probably the test that showed the widest margin in scores with the Momentus being as much as 31 seconds behind the next drive and 3-4 times as slow as the fastest.

Windows Boot Times

Windows start up/shutdown time is always something people are interested in and we haven’t done it in a while because there was little variation with the majority of the SSDs. However, on the hybrid drives, things are a little different. This test was also performed with a manual timing via stopwatch and should also carry the same half second +/- margin of error. The methodology employed was to force the BIOS to allow user selection of startup drive after load and begin timing from the time the enter button is pressed until the Windows desktop appears on the screen. All of the instances of Windows were identical and freshly installed with only the NVIDIA video driver installed.

Install Results: This is one of the places where the comparative slowness of the 7200 RPM platter Momentus is felt the most – and this is with just a basic Windows installation! Through in a few apps that have components load at start up (antivirus, Quicktime, etc) and this margin only grows.