Seagate ships 100 GByte notebook harddrive

Scotts Valley (CA) - Seagate expands its line of notebook hard drives : The new Momentus 5400.2 model comes in capacities up to 100 GB and an areal density of 50 GByte per disc.

Announced in June of this year, Seagate said that the second generation Momentus 5400 drive now is available. As the previous generation, the PATA harddrive (Ultra ATA/100) spins its platters at 5400 rpm. Compared to the Momentus 4200.2, the new drives offer about 50 percent more performance, Seagate said.

The Momentus 5400.2 will ship in two versions. The ST9100823A provides 100 GByte space, the ST9808211A 80 GByte. Average seek time is rated at 12.5 ms. Seagate believes that the harddrives will especially appeal to the emerging whitebook distribution channel, a relatively new segment which sells barebone notebooks lacking memory, CPU and a harddrive. System integrators have been pushing this market to quickly build notebooks and being able to easily enter the mobile computer market.

Seagate is the second manufacturer to ship 100 GByte harddrives for mobile computers. Hitachi announced its 100 GByte Travelstar drives on September 15.