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
Final Words
Seagate's Momentus XT should become the standard hard drive in any notebook shipped. The biggest problem I have with using any brand new machine, regardless of how fast it is, is that it never feels fast because it usually has a HDD and not an SSD. While the Momentus XT isn't quite as fast as an SSD, it's a significant improvement over the mechanical drives found in notebooks today.
In many cases the Momentus XT performs like a VelociRaptor, but in a lower power, quieter package. The impact of adding just a small amount of SLC NAND is tremendous. I wonder what kept Western Digital from sticking some NAND on its VelociRaptor instead of giving us the lackluster upgrade we got earlier this year.
The potential for hybrid drives continues to be huge, what Seagate has shown here is that with a minimal amount of NAND you can achieve some tremendous performance gains. There's no reason for any performance oriented mechanical drive to ship without at least some small amount of NAND on board. There's also much room for Seagate to innovate. We could see drives with more NAND or truly hybrid drives that provide read and write caching in NAND.
Compared standard 2.5" drives, the Momentus XT will set you back an additional $50 - 90 depending on the capacity point. The added cost is absolutely worth it. It's still a lot cheaper than an SSD since we're in the sub-$0.31 per GB area while SSDs sell in the range of $2 - $4 per GB.
If you're not going to buy an SSD for your notebook, then definitely go for the Momentus XT. I'd almost go as far as to say it's a great option for desktop users but unless you're on a budget you're probably better served by a small SSD + 3.5" drive on the desktop.
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pkoi - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
I have a 30gig SSD and haven't yet figured how to take advantage of it. OS and all program is above 100gig + 90% of It I don't read often.This is such a lost of NAND beyond 40 gig, I bet people with 80gig ssd don't read heavily on more than 30% of it's capacity.
About Time someone sort out for us, what file need to be on SSD and what doesn't.
x0rg - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
I would add $50 to buy X25-M 80GB and $50 more for external 250GB WD Passport, and that would make me happier :) I'm already using X25-M in my desktop for about a year and I'm not going down for any hybrid, SSD only as a system drive.Fox5 - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
All this seems to be doing in the same thing as the almost universally panned readyboost. Microsoft even had a spec for this called readydrive, and Intel had robson.If they enabled Readyboost on a PCIE or SATA drive, you could likely get this same performance (or better) by adding a low capacity SSD to your system. What would happen if you dedicated a small SSD to a pagefile btw? Does Windows persistently store page file information between boots, thus using it to speed boot times?
pkoi - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
I'd also like an answer to this, What software is able to sort out the "to be cached files ?"mpx999 - Tuesday, May 25, 2010 - link
Not really. Seagate decides what to cache based on disk block level. This is much more universal approach than file-statistics-based readyboost, as it allows to cache most frequently used blocks from large files, like virtual machine virtual disks or those giant *.dat files of games. Readyboost is good to speed up access to lots of small files, like *.dll *.ini or small exe, but is no good for extracting most used blocks of large files.x0rg - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
Could you add another regular Seagate Momentus 500GB hard drive 7200 rpm (not 5400)?That would be interesting to see if there is real difference between the regular HDD and the hybrid one.
skwareballz - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
You said that power would be equal or lesser to most HDDs, and I was wondering if that was do to the power used x time taken to complete w/e? Most charts showed the power consumption higher than the 5400.6 which could be a pretty average notebook HDD, but the time to boot up and what-not were much lower for the H-HHD. Just trying to figure out if watts/sec average would be lower and allow more battery life?Thanks for the good review, too.
7Enigma - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
Anand,I've been very pleased with your wait-and-see approach to most new technologies from the SSD front. So I was a bit shocked to see a glowing recommendation without the disclaimer to wait and see what happens in the next couple of months. This is potentially a great notebook drive (honestly for desktops a real SSD + mechanical HD is vastly superior but yes more expensive), but until we see some firmware updates and/or issues with the drive I think it should remain a recommendation with a major warning.
Thank you for the article; glad you're back!
Endoas - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
Any idea how hot these things get compared to a traditional HDD or SSD? I don't see any tests regarding this issue.iwodo - Monday, May 24, 2010 - link
Currently 4GB is being limited simply because of Software problem ( 64Bit OS Required ) rather then Hardware, We can already make single stick 4GB DDR3 cheaply, only the market is not there yet. When 64Bit reaches tipping point, ( 1 - 2 years time ), 4GB System would be minimum with 8GB or even 16GB system. With So much RAM we could cache those Random Read Write Directly to RAM. Why would would need a Hybrid HDD?The Built in NAND Flash doesn't make any sense to me.