Seagate Momentus XT: The Best of Both Worlds?

ACOUSTICS, VIBRATION & POWER

The Momentus XT is not only a very fast laptop hard drive, it's also very quiet, sharing similar acoustics to its fully mechanical brother. It measured about half a decibel lower than the Momentus 7200.4, 13~14 dBA idle and 14~15 dBA when seeking, essentially the same given sample variation and margin of error. It has a touch of whine but its seeks are muted and innocuous.

The rotation of the platters causes a low frequency 120 Hz spike, while seeking creates mostly high frequency noise at 3~5 KHz.

The Momentus XT also exhibits a similar, moderate level of vibration as the 7200.4, scoring a 7 on our subjective scale. It's not particularly bad for a laptop drive but there are a few 5400 RPM models that are noticeably superior in this regard like the Momentus 5400.6 and Hitachi 5K500.B.

While it has similar acoustics and vibration levels as the 7200.4, it's idle power consumption is poor by modern standards — we haven't seen 1.3 W idle from a laptop drive in 4~5 years. In addition, the drive needs to sit idle for about 30 seconds before the head parks, 3~4 times longer than most notebook drives, making its overall idle power even worse. After about 50 seconds the mechanical portion of the drive shuts down completely, but only when used as a secondary data drive — we did not experience this when running Windows on it. When seeking, the advantage swings the other way with the XT being more frugal by 0.27 W.

DRIVE COMPARISON

Like the Momentus 7200.4, the Momentus XT is one of the quietest notebook hard drive we've tested, though its power consumption is disappointing.