Seagate Momentus 7200.5 750GB Hard Drive Review (ST9750420AS)

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

As usual, hard drive manufacturers measure their drives in GB (1,000,000,000 bytes) but Windows reflects the logical measure of GiB (1,073,741,824 bytes). So, for the Seagate Momentus 750Gb drive, if you take the 750,153,363,456 bytes available, you end up with 698 GiB available. What makes it all the more confusing is the both Windows and manufacturers use the “GB” label which is why from time to time a consumer will cry “foul!” when their 750GB drive doesn’t appear as 750GB in Windows. Still, that’s a ton of storage space even with proliferation of today’s digital music and picture files.

It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed a true hard drive and honestly, it’s not the most exciting product line in the PC component realm but even with the growth of SSD use, spinning platter drives will still remain the mainstay for systems for quite some time. Even so, Seagate has managed to continue to make strides in improving performance and increasing capacities. We saw this 7200 RPM drive keep pace in many instances with an older 10,000RPM drive which demonstrated the efficiencies created with the SmartAlign technology and its dynamic 4k alignment. Best of all, its OS agnostic so no matter the platform, you still get the benefit.

As we mentioned in the introduction, the lowest price we could find online is $149.99, which reflects the hardships in the hard drive manufacturing space that has driven up the cost. Still, as compared to the reference Kingston HyperX 240GB drive at $450, it looks to be an absolute bargain. The tradeoff for copious storage at a much lower price comes at the expense of performance as the SSD just kills the hard drive in performance. But this isn’t news to anyone who has even casually perused the performance numbers of SSDs and we aren’t here to extoll the merits of SSDs.

There are still plenty of users who have not and will not make the SSD leap anytime soon, so in terms of the HDD realm, the Momentus 750GB drive is really a solid choice. Hanging with an albeit aging 10,000 RPM drive is no small feat and squeezing the virtually unmatched 750GB capacity into the 2.5″ form factor while putting out that kind of performance is impressive. While hard drives are still perceived by many as being more reliable than SSDs and Seagate covers their workmanship with a 3-year warranty which is pretty much the standard. Laptop users should note that this drive does not come equipped with a free-fall sensor to protect against shock damage when in use which is the only real shortcoming of the drive that we could see (although that feature is available in the lower capacity models). It will be interesting to see how the hard drive landscape continues to evolve.

Legit Bottom Line: If you have the need for a large amount of storage in a laptop or HTPC where space is premium, you’d be hard pressed to find a better option than the Seagate Momentus 750GB 2.5″ hard drive.