Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid Hard Drive Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

With SSDs making some minor inroads into the market hard drives used to have sole proprietorship over, manufacturers like Seagate needed something new to spice things up. Enter a new generation of hybrid drives which combine the capacity of a traditional hard drive with the high speed NAND of an SSD. The Momentus XT is one of the first which is available in a small form factor for notebooks, set top boxes and HTPCs.

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[_dangtx_]

finally we get an inhouse review as well! thanks guys

[lowfat]

Page 8 shows page 7 again.

[SKYMTL]

Odd. I will look into it but I think there may be an issue with the editing on my part.

[SKYMTL]

Fixed. Just need to do the text. Thanks for the heads up.

[INurHome]

Bought one on launch day as my second hdd to help manage my ssd space. It's a speedy HDD no doubt about it, but my Vertex 2 feels faster. ummm 4 cylinder vs 6 cylinder, you see?
I have read of some QC issue with drives dieing within the first day or so of use although mines been fine this whole while. I've seen them on sale for $100, and every time I do, I consider getting another for RAID. $150.00 was a bit much though...
-Chris

[mikellini]

I have to admit, I find the choice of drives to compare it against a little strange... 250GB WD Black? 500 GB WD Blue? The 'raptor makes sense... but then you've got one of the fastest SSDs on the market in the Vertex 2.

I would like to know how it performs against, say, a 1 TB WD Black. Maybe a 2 TB, you can find them for $160 now and the extra $40 is worth 1.5 TB to most people. Especially because I'm thinking that this wouldn't outperform it by all that much...

[draemn]

Overall I'm happy with the review and that you were careful to make sure that you let the drive 'learn and adapt' before spitting out benchmarks (unlike some Tom that everyone doesn't trust anyways)...

The only one that I'm curious about, is the whole OS boot and application loading... With the technology, does it write OS files to the NAND when shutting down or something and then write application files to the NAND once it logs in? Do they exist in tandum?

I'm a little confused how exactly it handles the balance between speeding up OS boot times and application loading. When you tested the loading time of Photoshop, what was your procedure? Did you restart the computer each time you tested how long it took to open photoshop or did you just open and close it a bunch of times in a row?

That's the real-world performance and workings that interest me the most... how do the algorithms speed up boot time and application launching times with only 4GB?

[Sihastru]

Unlike a “normal” hard drive PCB which has spindle chip, main controller and maybe an external ram chip, the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB has a trio of primary chips along with a couple more. The largest of these is the JMicron 4GB SLC NAND module.

To help control the NAND, Seagate has opted for a custom solution fabricated for them by eASIC. Unfortunately, neither company is particularly forthcoming about what this chip does but it is pretty obvious it most likely controls the Adaptive Memory Technology algorithms and by extension what is written to and read from the JMicron Flash chip.

Micron (that shares NAND flash tech with Intel) is not the same company as JMicron.

[Varroa]

I recently built a SFF-ish hackintosh and also wanted to be able to dual boot into Windows for use as a LAN party machine. Since the case was SFF (and I was already using a SSD for OSx) I installed one of these for Windows. I must say, Windows boots almost as fast off this little drive as it does on my main machine with a SSD. Games ran well and general use it is almost as fast as a SSD. I am very impressed with this drive and I plan on buying another one for my Zotac MAG box.