Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB ST9500420AS

Only recently have prices begun to level out to the point where owning a higher end laptop won't set you back several thousand greenbacks. Unheard of just a year or two ago, it's now possible to pick up a respectably spec'd 17-inch notebook for under a grand, and even some gaming laptops don't cost much more than that. The death of the desktop is by no means imminent, but never has there been a better time to be in the market for a mobile PC. But if there remains a weak spot in mobile computing, it's in the storage options. Not only do slower spindle hard drives still dominate the landscape, but so do lower capacities. Or at least that used to be the case.

There's still nothing in the notebook world that can touch the largest desktop drives, which now offer up to a portly 2TB, but the latest capacity milestone notwithstanding, mobile hard drives have begun closing the gap. Today we take a look at Seagate's newest Momentus model, the 7200.4 500GB hard drive. Representing the largest capacity yet offered in a notebook drive, Seagate also says its latest Momentus is also the best performing. That's a big claim, and not only will we throw the hammer down on the Momentus, but we'll test two of them in a RAID 0 array, giving us 1TB of total storage spinning at 7200RPM.

Specifications