Breather Hole

Like all other hard drives, the 250 GB Momentus 5400.5 comes with a breather hole. In this case, it's on the top plate on the upper left corner.

The breather hole allows condensation inside the hard drive to escape as well as equalizes the hard drive's internal pressure with the ambient pressure.

So, please make sure you do not occlude the hole when you install the hard drive!

Jumpers And Connectors

The 250 GB Momentus 5400.5 is only available with a Serial ATA interface. It comes with native support for SATA 3Gb/s but can revert to the slower SATA 1.5Gb/s if the SATA controller cannot support the faster interface.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard drive to your PC while it's still running.

To the left side of these SATA connectors is the jumper block. Generally, you do not need to mess around with the jumper block. In fact, Seagate states that it's only for "factory use", likely to downgrade the SATA interface to the 1.5 Gb/s mode for older notebooks that do not support the newer 3 Gb/s mode.

Usable Capacity

This Seagate Momentus 5400.5 drive officially has a formatted capacity of 250,059 MB. We checked that out by formatting both in NTFS using Windows Vista.

The actual formatted capacity was 250,057,060,352 bytes. This is slightly (57 MB) higher than the official formatted capacity. With about 94.4 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was slightly below 250 GB.

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