Scotts Valley (CA) - A new harddrive generation is making its way into mobile devices : Seagate is first to ship a 120 GByte version of its Momentus drive for mainstream mobile computers.

Seagate announced the drive Monday as addition to its present Momentus drive family. The new model will join the 5400.2 lineup, indicating a platter rotation speed of 5400 rpm and mainstream notebooks as primary target market.

According to Seagate spokesman Michael Hall, the drives will be shipping in May and soon be available in common mobile computers, depending on OEMs and their preferences. Given the fact that today’s mainstream notebooks are mainly offered with 40 and 60 GByte drives, we would expect this number to increase to at least 80 GByte in the near future as a result of the introduction of the new capacity range. Seagate’s high-end offering for notebooks remains the Momentus 7200.1, with a speed of 7200 rpm and a capacity of up to 100 GByte.

The company said the Momentus 5400.2 offers the battery consumption similar to a 4200-rpm drive, but about 50 percent more performance. Maximum internal data transfer rate is posted at 48.25 MByte per second, average seek time at 12.5 ms and latency at 5.6 ms. Momentus drives can withstand up to 900 Gs of non-operating shock and 250 Gs of operating shock to safeguard drive data, Seagate said.

According to the product announcement, Seagate claims to offer the highest capacity for notebooks. To our knowledge, there is no other 2.5" drive offering more than 120 GByte space at this time, however Seagate is likely not to remain the only manufacturer selling such a device. For example, Fujitsu already announced its 120 GByte drive in early March of this year - with shipping expected to begin in the second quarter of this year. An exact shipping date could not be confirmed at the time of publication of this article.

Related stories :