Seagate will stop making 2.5” 7,200rpm drives
Seagate has confirmed to AnandTech that they will be discontinuing the production of their existing 2.5-inch 7,200rpm hard drives. This includes four product lines from Seagate, which are the Momentus 7200.4 and 7200.2, Momentus Thin 7200, and Momentus XT (hybrid) drives.
The decision comes mainly due to the falling prices of solid state drives. While SSD prices are still sky high when comparing the $/GB rate with mechanical drives; a smaller capacity SSD (30GB) with a 5,400rpm drive provides a faster and cheaper solution than Seagate's Momentus XT which pairs a 7,200rpm drive with 8GB flash.
For laptop manufacturers, 7,200rpm drives are still a premium add-on, and plugging in smaller capacity SSDs, even up to 64GB provides better value to customers than 7,200rpm drives. As for the high-end laptops, especially gaming machines, having double drives is not a big deal, so a separate SSD drive for Windows and another mechanical drive for data storage is pretty common.
No word yet on whether Seagate will introduce a larger flash capacity Momentus XT drive to compete with the hybrid solutions available in the market, but by next year their 7,200rpm drives will be history.
The decision comes mainly due to the falling prices of solid state drives. While SSD prices are still sky high when comparing the $/GB rate with mechanical drives; a smaller capacity SSD (30GB) with a 5,400rpm drive provides a faster and cheaper solution than Seagate's Momentus XT which pairs a 7,200rpm drive with 8GB flash.
For laptop manufacturers, 7,200rpm drives are still a premium add-on, and plugging in smaller capacity SSDs, even up to 64GB provides better value to customers than 7,200rpm drives. As for the high-end laptops, especially gaming machines, having double drives is not a big deal, so a separate SSD drive for Windows and another mechanical drive for data storage is pretty common.
No word yet on whether Seagate will introduce a larger flash capacity Momentus XT drive to compete with the hybrid solutions available in the market, but by next year their 7,200rpm drives will be history.
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