Acer and Seagate have joined hands to offer the latest Seagate Momentus 5400.6 hard drives for the Acer Aspire and TravelMate professional laptops.

Based on an areal density of 395 GB per square inch, the 500GB Momentus 5400.6 is said to be the highest capacity drive for a notebook. It also boasts to deliver a data transfer rate of 87 Mbps. It comes in a wide range of storage capacities such as 500GB, 320GB, 250GB, 160GB and 120GB with 8MB of cache.The 2.5-inch 5400-rpm drive supports capacity-boosting Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology and comes with a powerful Serial ATA 3GB/second interface.

“Acer mobile PC customers want notebooks that deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to meet their needs for capacity, performance and durability. Seagate’s new 500GB Momentus hard drive enables Acer to deliver the richest multimedia experience and on-the-go robustness available for notebook computers,” commented Campbell Kan, vice president of the Mobile Computing Business Unit at Acer.

According to BanSeng Teh, vice president and managing director, Seagate Asia Pacific, “We are pleased that Acer is delivering cutting-edge mobile computers with 500GB notebook hard drives from Seagate, with more personal computer makers to follow. Seagate continues to advance hard drive capacity, speed and durability, and our latest 500GB 2.5-inch drives and 1.5 Terabyte 3.5-inch drives provide the highest capacities on the planet to meet the growing need to create, store, share and protect digital content.

In addition to high-speed and massive memory, the Momentus 5400.6 drives also concentrates on the security and protection of vital data. These robust hard drives are capable of enduring up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock.

Besides, these models come equipped with G-Force Protection - a free-fall sensor technology to guard drive from damage and data loss during drops.

Motherboards with G45 Express chipsets have begun slowly trickling into the market, and some manufacturers are giving the new Intel integrated graphics chipset royal treatment. Case in point: Gigabyte's EG45M-DS2H, which pairs the G45 with some features you'd expect to see on much fancier boards.

The EG45M-DS2H channels the G45's built-in GMA X4500 HD graphics into VGA, DVI, and HDMI display outputs. You'll also find six 300MB/s Serial ATA ports (including one external port) with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 array configurations. Other features include Gigabyte's Dynamic Energy Saver tech, Dolby Home Theater-certified audio, a built-in Trusted Platform Module chip, S/PDIF, FireWire, and Gigabit Ethernet.The G45 chipset gives the board support for 1333MHz front-side bus speeds and 800MHz DDR2 memory, but Gigabyte claims the board can hit 1600MHz on the FSB and 1066MHz for the memory when overclocking. Speaking of overclocks, the EG45M-DS2H features enthusiast-class goodies like dual BIOSes, solid-state capacitors, ferrite core chokes, and low-resistance MOSFETs. That said, enthusiasts may feel limited by the mobo's lone PCI Express x16 slot, which only features four lanes of PCIe connectivity.

Let’s talk about SCSI for a moment. The disk interface which was once ubiquitous with high-end workstations and servers is now on the verge of obsolescence. With the influx of inexpensive and reliable Serial ATA hard disks and hardware SATA RAID controllers (which can provide excellent performance at a fraction of a SCSI’s price), it’s not surprising to see why legacy SCSI doesn’t even enter the mind of enterprise server and workstation platform buyers, even those diehards of the past.
However, like PATA's evolution to SATA, SCSI has also gone the way of serial connectivity and it still holds its advantages. For example, 15K RPM hard disks are only available with a SCSI or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface, and true hardware SAS RAID cards, when paired with 15,000 RPM disks, can deliver performance that SATA setups simply can’t deliver at this point in time. Not to mention the additional diagnostic, error reporting and recovery capabilities of SAS in a RAID set, that you just can't get in the event of a drive failure in a SATA RAID set. However, the price per gigabyte versus the performance that SAS offers over SATA simply hasn’t worked out in favor of SAS, and as such, the standard has been struggling to stay relevant. This is evident in the new generation of solid state hard drives (SSDs) being offered with SATA interfaces and not a hint of SAS SSD offerings on the horizon.That said SAS solution providers seem to be reacting, as the barriers to entry for SAS versus SATA have been fading away as of late. SAS controller cards can be had for a little as $70, and SAS hard drives are dropping in price, though historically capacities have trailed SATA by a long shot. Also, some new motherboards offerings are being equipped with onboard SAS controllers as well.


Today, we’ll be showcasing one of the most significant developments to date, toward getting SAS more frequently into the vernaculars of workstation/server buyers and maybe even a few enthusiasts - relatively cheap, high-capacity SAS storage – thanks to Seagate. Seagate currently offers 10,000 and 15,000 RPM disks with SAS interfaces at a fraction of the capacity versus SATA offerings and as such, much higher prices. However, Seagate just launched their Barracuda ES.2 platform with a SAS interface that offers capacities up to 1 Terabyte (1 TB). Not only is the Barracuda ES.2 the highest capacity SAS disk to date, it’s also the first SAS disk we’ve seen on the market with a 7,200 RPM spindle speed and SATA-like pricing.