14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, Seagate unveiled their brand-new 250 GB Momentus 5400.4 portable hard drive. Although everybody would have expected the disk to continue the Seagate tradition of hybrid drives introduced last year, a note inside the presentation specified that the Momentus 5400.4 contains "no flash".
The company's hybrid hard drives were unveiled during the last year's Consumer Electronics Show. Moreover, the company announced that it would move a large portion of its mobile hard-drive business to the new technology that mixes spinning platters with the ultra-fast NAND flash memory. Although the new technology was appealing to the customers, there has been no significant performance boost to impress them any further.
"What the consumers came to us and said, and what the lackluster reviews told us, was that?customers want more performance out of hybrid drives," said Joni Clark, senior product marketing manager of Seagate's personal computer business. "They said, go back to the hybrid technology, and give us either larger [amounts of] flash, a better use of flash, or a combination of both."
Inside a Hybrid hard-disk drive, the NAND Flash memory acts like a larger write-cache, that will queue the write requests, and then it will release them all at the same time. After that, the disk enters an idle, low-power state, thus saving the battery life.
According to Clark, the next flash drive will be announced "soon" and will feature improved flash performance. "That sucker is fast and will blow anything that's out there today out of the water," she said. The company released the Momentus 5400.4 that ships in two capacities, namely 125 GB or 250 GB. The manufacturer estimates that the Momentus series will sell best in the first quarter of 2008. At the same time, Seagate predicts that these drives will be replaced with larger ones (250- and 320 GB disks) within the next year.