Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD Hybrid Hard Drive
Notebook Reviews > Laptop Parts > Momentus 5400 PSD HHD

Review Date: 5 Nov' 2007

June 2006, Seagate announced venturing into Hybrid Hard Drives. However it wasn't until October this year, and after a very long wait that the company actually started shipping these hybrid disks for the masses.

Seagate is not the first to market hybrid drives. Samsung was the first to cut the red ribbon, however for OEM manufacturers only. Still, Seagate is the first one to sell publicly a 160GB Hybrid drive with 256MB of flash memory.

Seagate Momentus 5400 Power Saving Drives (PSD), as the name suggest, are quite capable of reducing the power required to read and write data on a PC, and thus are extremely useful for notebook computers.

How they make it possible is simple, at least notionally. Unlike the traditional hard disk drives, these hybrid drives also include flash memory within their architecture. Therefore it's this flash component of the storage device where frequently accessed files are saved; hence the need to for the drive to spin, access the mechanical part, and therefore consume more of power is kept at a minimum. Hybrid drives can save 50% of power as required by a traditional disk.

Apart from improving the battery time of notebook PC's, hybrid drives also help users reducing the time it takes to boot their systems. They do so by making use of the flash memory to serve initial boot-up files while the disc starts spinning.

We won't go into the precise details, but Momentus 5400 PSD drives also offer higher reliability and greater performance. Since the platter doesn't spin as much as in a traditional drive, it mostly escapes the wear and tear process or we can say endures for a longer period of time before showing signs of smashing up, hence your data stays in a more reliable disc. As for the performance, by making use of features in OS such as Windows Vista's ReadyDrive, Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid drives allow for faster retrieval of frequently accessed files.

On account of Windows Vista, with its optimization features such as ReadyDrive, becoming the de facto operating system for majority of coming notebook pc's, the future of hybrid drives is bright and Seagate's Momentus 5400 PSD is definitely one of the better choices available for today's customers. However what we would really like to be incorporated in hybrid rives is flash component becoming a much larger piece of the cake than the current 256MB in Momentus 5400 PSD, perhaps 2 to 4GB.