TEST: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB vs. Original Hitachi 5K500.B 160GB

Hi there,

since I had Problems with battery life on my MacBook Pro 13" (only a max. of 4:12) I ran some tests and it seems that the harddrive is the one to blame.

Testing conditions:
- fully charged battery
- fresh restart
- full display brightness
- energy safings set to "never" (both for display and standby)
- iTunes playing the whole library in a random loop (muted, since I slept during the tests)
- running my test script until the mac went to sleep

The test script appends a string to a text file once in a minute, which is formated like that:

Mi 8 Jul 2009 22:22:20 CEST

So all I had to do was look at this text file and see how long the Mac stayed on.

I ran 3 tests with the following configurations:

1. Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB + Kingston Value Ram 4GB
2. Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB + original RAM 2GB
3. original Hitachi 5K500.B 160GB + original RAM 2GB

And here the test results:

1. 04:12
2. 04:17
3. 06:51

That's a difference of 02:34 between 2. and 3.!

I wonder if others had the same experience with the Seagate Momentus. If you would like to run the same test on your System, here's a zip File with my test results and the test script. Just unzip and run the script in the terminal. It will create a file called "akkutest.txt" in the directory it's running in.

http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1457999/Akkutest/Archiv.zip

Edit: The Momentus is the one without the G-sensor

Message was edited by: unruhschuh