Seagate Momentus comes to Dell laptops

320GB on the go offered in top-end portables

Dell has become the first PC manufacturer to ship systems using Seagate's Momentus 7200.3 hard drive, which the vendor claims is the industry's first 7,200rpm 320GB hard drive for mobile computing.

The Momentus already powers Dell's XPS laptop PCs and will be available soon in select Alienware laptops.

"Laptop users want every bit of capacity, performance and durability that desktop PCs deliver," said Michael Wingert, executive vice president and general manager at Seagate's Personal Compute Business.

The 2.5in drive combines a fast Serial ATA 3Gbps interface with 7,200rpm spin speed and a 16MB cache.

The Momentus also provides G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology to help prevent drive damage and data loss on impact if a laptop is dropped.

G-Force Protection detects any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity, then "parks" the head off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as eight inches.

The Momentus series is built to withstand up to 1,000G of non-operating shock and 350G of operating shock.

Seagate said that the drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges.

They are also "virtually inaudible" thanks to Seagate's SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology.