Seagate's Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD

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• Faruk88 - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  Hey Anand,
  
  As always I love your reviews - great job!
  
  I have a quick question: Does this drive constantly spin up and spin down to save power? The reason I ask is because this puts a lot of wear on the mechanical drive.. so I would stay away from this drive if that is the case.
  
  I still wonder why no drive manufacturer has tried to pair 60-80GB of flash with a mechanical drive and combine it into one 2.5" package. Instead of having a hybrid drive like this, I would rather have one Flash partition for my OS and apps, and one partition on the mechanical drive for the rest of my data. This would be useful for laptops, which usually only have one drive bay. Obviously the two "drives" would have to share the SATA bus, but I think the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages.
  
  Faruk

• kmmatney - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  I would also like a system like that. You can also backup for flash partition to the mechanical partition.

• void2 - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  Core i3-350M, 5400 RPM 2.5" HDD, clean Windows 7 - and I get ~30 seconds from power button to web browser (~22 seconds if I would install "Boot Cooler", but that's not the point). You, on the other hand, get ~50 seconds on "partial" boot sequence (no POST, no web browser) and much more powerful CPU. It definitely looks like Windows 7 ReadyBoot (successor to "regular" WinXP boot prefetch) did not have enough time to learn. So this does not look like real-life comparison.

• Drag0nFire - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  With any notebook HDD, one of the most important considerations for me is how noisy it is. I really value a quiet notebook.
  
  Although I know this won't be as quiet as an SSD, could you describe the noise characteristics? Can you hear it at idle? Seeking?
  
  Thanks Anand!

• wyemarn - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  Tom's came up with an article comparing XT with a plain Momentus 7200.4
  
  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-moment...

• nickkb - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  The Tom's Hardware review was almost a polar-opposite of Anand's. They performed a number of tests but did not include what I think is absolutely crucial to the intended purpose of this drive: the Boot Time vs. # of runs. I don't know what they intended to extract from all of their tests, as the base storage media of this drive is mechanical, not flash. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the XT performed almost on-par with the vanilla version of the Momentus 7200.4 in many of their tests.

• leexgx - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  most of tomshardware is just junk most of the time and i recommend no one going onto there site as you just end up asking more questions

• fboone1 - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  I'm definitely intrigued by this drive. If I were to put 2 of them in a RAID 0 array, what would happen? Would I have effectively 8GB of NAND cache? Would doing so greatly increase performance?

• BJ Eagle - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - link

  I for one would certainly alspo like to see RAID 0 and 1 results. I would suspect that this Momentus XT drive would benefit similiar to RAID as traditional harddrives, but it would be nice to have it confirmed.

• CharonPDX - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link

  Compared to the Seagate Momentus 5400.6 the XT uses considerable more power. ... What this means is that depending on your workload you might see worse notebook battery life with the Momentus XT compared to a mainstream drive.

  
  
  Since when is a third of a Watt at idle, three-quarters of a Watt at load, "consider[ably] more power"?
  
  With most notebooks nowadays having a 40 Watt-hour batteries or higher, an increase of one Watt won't exactly kill battery life. And that's assuming it's going constantly at full power.