Seagate's Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 24, 2010 9:31 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- SSDs
- Seagate
- Momentus XT
- Hybrid Drive
- SSHDs
Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
The PCMark Vantage Suite puts the Momentus XT smack in the middle of the 5400.6 and the VelociRaptor. The individual suites generally tell a similar story, although in some cases the drive actually outperforms the VelociRaptor.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are very well suited to SSDs since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. All of the SSDs dominate here, but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
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Chloiber - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
As I said: all files up to 256k (512B - 256k) can be stored on the 4GB Module. I don't think that the firmware moves bigger files onto the NAND, because it is a waste of space and a waste of performance gain (there is nearly no gain).Just check it with JDiskReport for example. On my system (windows 7 x64, many programs, some games on partition C, install is ~8 months old) all files from 0-256k together make up about 3GB of space.
So again: 4GB should be enough for most users to store EVERY smaller file (256k is rather big).
void2 - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
If you want to speed up Windows boot - you do not need neither SSD nor hybrid HDD. Just install and configure Boot Cooler (www.bootcooler.com). It is free. But it is beta. And it will not accelerate application launches after Windows boot.cauchy2k - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
I think SF-1200 SSDs controller (with its new free space tweak) are affordable compared to other SSDs prices,Intel which is one of the cheapest and better ones cost 225 for 80 GB, and this one cost 200 for 60 GB.SF-1200 SSDs are just 18,4% more expensive than intel's alternative.Maaniu - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
If they put a somthing that works like a real ssd with a hdd i think then we will see real performance.Thanks.
P.s i have been checking out your site 4 sometime now you totally satisfy my tech cravings.
bmgoodman - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
Interesting article, but I still have no idea of my HP Mini netbook (2 GB RAM) would benefit at all from this drive. Considering the CPU is a *huge* bottleneck, I just wonder if anything would feel snappier with this drive? For now, I must keep searching....ash9 - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
This product is great for laptops, an added 2/3/ hours of added usage with a real graphics card is worth the extra cash.asH
marraco - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
Reading web pages saves lot of small files to disk.I would like to know if a SSD helps loading web pages. If true, this also would hurt this hybrid kind of drive, because maybe lots of small files used only once could be stored in the flash memory.
Chloiber - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - link
It definitely does, but I cannot provide numbers.I had a Hitachi 5400rpm in my laptop (~2 years old). I changed to a UltraDrive ME (GX) about 16 months ago. And the pages load definitely faster. I always had a feeling, that the HDD limited somehow web page loading, because I really heard how stressful this really is to a slow HDD.
Again, no numbers here, but they load definitely faster if you used a slow/old HDD before (don't think that there is any difference with fast 7200rpm HDDs).
araczynski - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - link
sounds like a nice project for bored engineers, but I personally hate hybrid anything. its there to just delay the inevitable and/or milk the old as long as possible, while at best complicating the overall system and increasing potential failure points.just like cars.
enderwiggin21 - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - link
And yet any step forward is better than standing still.