perpendicular!!!!!!

http://gprime.net/flash.php/getperpendicular

The 5400.3's seeks sound sharper... therefore more noticeable than the 5400.2's? I'm running a 7K100 in my laptop with AAM on, and it's decently quiet, and FAST!

Great, thorough, informative review. I have a question though: does perpendicular recording technology in and of itself produce a noise reduction over longitudinal recording, or is it still mostly dependent on spindle speed and manufacturer damping technologies (eg Samsung's Noiseguard, Silentseek, etc)? For example, you indicate that the 5400.2 and 5400.3 noise emissions are basically indistinguishable (apart from the seeks); is this because their spindle speed is the same?

While an increase of capacity in near-silent drives is always good, it is a shame one of the manufacturers doesn't produce just one line of hard drives where silent operation is really the goal; the Samsung Spinpoints really don't and aren't meant to meet this very demanding criteria.

Seeking (no pun intended) information on a 80gb, 1 platter, much cheaper model in SATA. When?? I'm guessing nobody knows, so any personal estimates? These drives look like a real possibility in migrating from my desktop P80's to notebook drives.

I'll start. I'm guessing seagate still cannot produce these in huge quantities, so it will continue to produce the perpendicular drives in only the flagship size of 160gb (high margins). SATA will come soon as devon/SPCR estimates, but an 80 gig single platter model will not show up until their previous generation is phased out and they are capable of volume cost effective production of the perpendicular 80 gig single platter size and/or if a capacity larger than 160 gig is released before. My personal estimate for 80gig SATA 1-platter is late Q2. I hope I am wrong and it is earlier!

-Ken

Att: Mike and other reviewers.

Finding tests of the latest small capacity drives here at SPCR is quite easy and I fully understand that in order to get the most silent setup, one has to go this way. However there are some of us, for whom this does not cut it. We need biiiiig drives and several of them, to store our dvds, cds, recorded shows and the like on. We simply cannot do with these small ones. But finding a test of a 500GB or more drive seems to be impossible, and since these drives are often quite loud, knowing what to choose here makes a huge impact. It should be noted that for such drives performance is often not an issue, so just a test of the drive's performance noisewise would do fine, as the other can be found elsewhere.

I hope that you will take this into consideration when choosing drives for future tests.

Rgds.

Maybe a review of Samsungs new T-series would do it?

It seems promising, available in a 400GB version.

That should be interesting to see, no doubt. But in order to know, you need to know how it performs compared to similar sized drives; the hitachi, seagate and maxtor.

Hi,

Has anyone anywhere seen a momentus 5400.3 with sata interface?

I was planning to use one of these in my htpc setup
but it seems that seagate only delivers it with ata interface

Mfg
Flo

anyone compared it to the hitachi drive of the same type? hows it perform compared to say a 7200rpm?

I have to speak out and say that this HDD is NOT recommended. I just bought 2 of these and they both exhibit an EXTREMELY annoying "click-squeak" sound every few moments. It is very audible, and very very annoying!

EDIT: Solution to this problem is to use NHC or hdparm to set the hard disk's performance mode to 254. see this excellent post by carveone for more details!

I bought this disk (PATA version, 160 GB) to replace the disk of my laptop that failed ( ) and I think it is very silent.