Momentus 5400 PSD

To usher in Windows Vista and its ReadyDrive prefetch technology, Seagate will be launching their own hybrid hard drive series, called the Momentus 5400 PSD.

This is, of course, a notebook hard drive with a 5400 RPM spindle speed, as the name Momentus 5400 tells you. PSD, on the other hand, is short for Power Saving Drive. That's really what's so attractive about hybrid drive technology in notebooks - reduced power consumption.

The secret lies in the integration of 256MB of flash memory into a standard Momentus hard drive. By storing a large amount of data, it allows the drive to spin down its platters more often. This not only reduces power consumption, it also increases the drive's lifespan by reducing mechanical wear.

When used with Windows Vista, the most commonly used data would be stored in the non-volatile flash memory. This allows the drive to boot up as well as recover from hibernation much faster than normally possible.

Naturally, it's targeted at notebook computers, tablet PCs as well as external storage devices that run off batteries.

The new Momentus 5400 PSD drives will be available in the first quarter of 2007 with capacities of up to 160GB. It will ship with a SATA 3Gb/s interface.

Here is a list of its key features :

• Data integrity - Momentus 5400 PSD protects data by maintaining control of the data on the drive side at all times
• Faster boot up and resume - by booting up from the flash cache
• Reduced power consumption - by reducing platter spin time
• Better performance in Windows Vista - in short file reads / writes by using the large non-volatile cache
• Greater reliability - reduced mechanical wear improves reliability of the drive