Introduction

While we focus a lot on the desktop sectors at TweakTown, we do also like to keep an eye on the mobile sectors and as of late there has been a huge development. First we have the release of Core Duo and Core Solo CPU's for Intel lovers. On the other side of the CPU cotenant we have AMD and its Mobile Turion and Turion X2 CPU's. DDR-2 memory has now become available for mobile applications and with nVidia and ATI's drive on the graphics front we think mobile computing is slowly starting to look better than desktop.

There is one part of the mobile market that hasn't changed much and that is storage technology. While DVD-R and various other forms of storage have become available, the Hard Disk is still the main storage area for the operating system as well as data to be saved on the computer.

Mobile based Hard Disk drives are a lot smaller, in fact over 1 inch smaller in height and nearly 3 inches in length. With this space saving comes some draw backs. First off, mobile drives don't hold as much data as desktop units; previously 120GB was the max, while desktop drives have moved to half a terabyte (500GB). Another draw back is that mobile drives are slower than desktop drives, some models still run at 4200 or 4800RPM, while desktop counterparts hit 7,200 and even 10,000 RPM speeds (server orientated drives faster again), reducing the time taken to retrieve data.

Today we are looking at the latest model from Seagate's Momentus line which is set for the high-end mobile market and ultra small form factor PC's. So come all ye faithful and join us in a look at the Seagate Momentous 5400.3 160GB notebook drive and we'll see just what it is capable of when we throw it on the test bed.