Seagate 2nd Generation Momentus XT (750GB) Hybrid HDD Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 13, 2011 12:51 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Seagate
- Momentus XT
- Hybrid Drive
- HDDs
- SSHDs
Power Consumption and Drive Behavior
Our power consumption tests are really worst case scenario for the Momentus XT since the cache is hardly given time to work here. In these tests the Momentus XT looks to be in-line with other, similar drives. In normal use however you may see even better behavior from the drive. If data is being requested out of the drive's NAND cache, the rest of the Momentus XT can actually spin down to save power. In practice I did notice the Momentus XT spinning up and down much more aggressively than a traditional hard drive. I know this was a problem with the original drive where it was a bit too aggressive in the power management department. My advice to Seagate would be to be more conservative here, particularly while only caching reads. The Momentus XT has the ability to deliver great performance, I'd leave the power savings for a version of the drive with a bigger cache and the ability to cache reads and writes. Otherwise I feel that the Momentus XT will do a lot of spinning up and spinning down for little gain.
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kyuu - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
RAID0 does not "break" these drives. They work just fine, and you see the usual advantages of RAID0 and essentially will have a 1.5TB drive with 16GB of NAND cache.If you google, you will see plenty of reviews of the previous gen drive in RAID0.
Springfield45 - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
Are these drives capable of supporting RAID arrays?If so, could an array of four of them in RAID 5 have an effective 24GB cache?
How would that effect performance?
kyuu - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
1) Yes.2) Yes.
3) Google for reviews of the previous model in RAID0.
wharris1 - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
I'm currently using the first XT in my laptop and have been very happy. Much snappier resumes and loading of chrome/email. Couldn't rationalize spending ~$4-500 for a decent sized SSD that might still get tight with all my pictures/media and the 500GB size for I believe around $150 was great. I do have a 240 GB OCZ vertex 3 in my desktop with a 2 GB WD black for storage but couldn't do that with my laptop, thus the XT was perfect. I also liked the prior poster's idea of using the new 750 GB XT as a desktop storage disk paired with a SSD, but at $245 seems a little expensive, but then, every HDD looks ridiculously expensive right now. Great review and I really like the overall price/GB/performance of these drives.RP94805 - Tuesday, December 18, 2012 - link
I agree with Current Owner...I actually have two of the 500 gig XTs - the first in my 6 year old duo-core notebook that I purchased when the XTs first came out (and yes that made a huge difference in keeping the computer usable for the last couple of years) and the second I just added to a brand new 14" i7 QM Notebook that I bought that had a regular 500 gig 5400 rpm drive as standard.
I bought the i7 and one of the few things I thought was limiting was the 5400 rpm drive - so since I needed the storage space and was happy with my first XT i looked to the 500 gig XT as it was only $50 on sale (timing was just right, at purchase there was mention of an additional $30 savings if purchased by 11.21.12.) This was by far the best $50 upgrade I could make to the system.
As to reliability, I have never encountered anything at all wrong about my first XT drive and it is still running strong - don't know if the very first batch were ok, then a bad batch, then "fixed" and that is what I bought now.
I definitely could not justify the additional $75-100 (on sale) for the additional size and slight increase in performance (and yes my i7 could make use of the Sata 6gb/sec speed of the newer model). Maybe in a year or two when prices drop the 750gig XT would then be a possible upgrade to my i7 notebook. But right now, I am a firm believer in the XTs over any 5400 rpm notebook drive and even to me the 7200 rpm notebook drives - the boot and shut down times are very SSD like (in my desktops I have the SSD + Large HDD setups) and for a business notebook where I frequently launch exactly the same applications (Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Chrome, etc) the application launch times are very fast.
beginner99 - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
it costs 239. here in local currency.An intel 310 80 GB mSata costs 179.
A laptop usually already ships with a HDD and if it has an mSATA slot, buying the momentus xt makes no sense price and performance wise.
sheh - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
What happens when the flash starts failing? Will the drive turn into a standard HDD, or become unusable? What's its life expectancy?Denithor - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
It's SLC so with even a mediocre controller it's going to have a very long lifespan. Plus the fact that you aren't writing directly to the drive - it's writing only your most commonly used files and then reading them back multiple times - so as long as you're repetitive with your usage pattern there will be minimal writes and therefore wearing out shouldn't be an issue.kyuu - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
The drive will essentially be a normal Momentus 2.5" 7200 RPM drive if the NAND ever fails for some reason. Everything in the cache is still on the hard drive.Keep in mind it's SLC NAND and you have a 5-year warranty, so, it's not really something to worry to much about.
sheh - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - link
Did Seagate officially say anything on the matter?Yes, it's SLC (I tend to use drives more than 5 years), for reads only (for now), all the data remains also on the platters. But the drive will fail if the firmware wasn't coded to disable the caching mechanism when the flash starts failing. Doesn't seem likely it was ignored, but who knows.
It's not that I plan on getting one of these, but I'm curious nonetheless.