Seagate Momentus XT 500GB ST95005620AS Review

[onethreehill]

When it comes to storage solutions for your computer, you have to choose between fast speeds with a solid state drive, or a slower, yet, high capacity mechanical drive. Sure you could buy an SSD for your boot drive and an HDD for storage, but that involves spending quite a pretty penny. On the other hand, what if you want something fast and high capacity for your netbook which only one has drive bay? Now you can have the best of both worlds.

Seagate has had this drive in the works for a while now, and has finally taken the covers off of it. This new drive introduces radically new technology that bridges the gap between slower mechanical drives and the speed of the SSD’s. Seagate named this series Momentus XT and it is what they call a Hybrid Drive. The Momentus XT uses both the traditional HDD platters for maximum storage in addition to a small internal SSD for increased access speed.

So what does this mean for the end user? With the Momentus XT, Seagate has developed a special algorithm that is called ”Adaptive Memory Technology”, which analyzes the users computing habits, such as if the user frequently opens Photoshop documents. The technology takes the most accessed files that Photoshop uses and stores them on the fast, 4GB SSD integrated on the drive. This allows the user to start the program faster because the data is pulled from the SSD, instead of having to spin the hard drive platters to seek the data. As the needs of the user changes, so does the data stored on the SSD of the drive. This also works for files pertaining to booting the operating system, email clients, games and more. The design of a traditional hard drive and the quickness of an SSD give a perfect balance between speed and storage space.....

http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...ntus_xt_500gb/
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Seag...ybrid-Preview/
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_review
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...=525&Itemid=60
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/s...ood-hybrid-hdd
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2364084,00.asp
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1310/1/
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-ssd,2638.html

[Nano2k]

This looks good!

[Bodkin]

Perfect for storing games it seems!

[kromosto]

better then i expect

[RejZoR]

The problem with this test is that they use synthetic tests which are completelly menaingless here. What would really show the (real) performance is system boot'shutdown, file copy/move operations, encoding of files, file indexing, file searching...
Because from te benches it looks like tools were always accessing SSD part only and only in few tests they touched platters as well mostly those with ~80MB read...
The drive is showing a potential there but the testing methodology is flawed. What works for classic HDD's and SSD's doesn't work for HHDD's (Hybrid HDD ).

[Soulburner]

How does this work with Windows 7 Superfetch? It already does this, but with RAM, which is many times faster than flash memory.

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

I'd like to see some more real world tests before buying this. The price is on target though.

If this does do well loading games, running two 500gb drives in raid would really help load maps a whole heck of a lot faster.

What do you guys think of this as a laptop drive? I was considering getting a 60gb agility or vertex, but this might be a good compromise.

I am a little disappointed though about the price per GB though. No real point in saving 40 bucks. You can just eat that cost and double your storage. I can't see anything but the 500gb flying off the shelves. The rest IMO are flyover, until the price drops.

[RejZoR]

I paid this much for Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB without any SLC NAND attached to it. So the price is just fine and is pretty much a no brainer...

[Manicdan]

the cheaper ones definitely are a little overpriced, but the 500GB is really sweet, a perfect medium of both worlds. i might have to buy it for my moms laptop, which feels horrible slow.

[sniper_sung]

Buying Seagate = buying risks.

I doubt if any of these disks can pass MHDD sequential scan.

[zalbard]

better then i expect

QFE.
It looks very good.
It's not as fast as SSDs, though, don't fool yourself into thinking so. Check IOmeter benches.
But the performance improvement is really nice. Totally worth moving from traditional HDDs!
I foresee more manufacturers coming up with similar stuff.

[cegras]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/s...ood-hybrid-hdd

[LightSpeed]

AT review was great, as always

I want NAND on the VR 600GB!

[RejZoR]

Buying Seagate = buying risks.

I doubt if any of these disks can pass MHDD sequential scan.

It's using SLC so i wouldn't worry too much. It wouldn't hurt to see what controler is used and what NAND they used but still.
I have the fastest Momentus and so far it's working fine. I'm running CrystalDiskInfo just as precaution on all my systems for SMART monitoring.
One WD Scorpio Blue 160GB, one WD caviar Black 2TB and one Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB. And out of these, Samsung Spinpoint F1 750 was the first to fail. WD Caviar Black 2TB replaced it. And Samsung's aren't exactly known to fail a lot. But it happens.

[Manicdan]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/s...ood-hybrid-hdd

can someone explain why the boot time chart shows the raptor getting faster over time too? did he go into hibernate or something?

[>HyperlogiK<]

Hmm... I'm curious to see how these perform in RAID 5. I was going to grab an SSD for Windows and another 1TB Black Edition for storage but I'm interested to see whether three of these might do the same job.

[Sam_oslo]

This looks like a great option for notebooks. The same consept, and almost the same good performance as SSD + HDD that we have been using on desktops.

[Darakian]

can someone explain why the boot time chart shows the raptor getting faster over time too? did he go into hibernate or something?

That is a bit suspect

[Hockster]

Meh, it's a Seagate. It'll probably fail sooner rather than later.

[ExodusC]

This actually seems like a great choice for a notebook, based on the AnandTech review. I was going to put my Vertex 60GB in my laptop when I get one, and then put its drive in an external case... This is a little tempting, though.

[Telperion]

There's no reason to ever buy a "performance" traditional platter drive (i.e., a non-hybrid drive now that this is out) for a notebook anymore when this is on the market. There will always be a market for 3.5" storage drives (until something else replaces the technology entirely) and fully SSDs, but OEMs and notebook users ought to flock to these things.

Anybody know how many platters are on these models? I'm considering one for a build I might be doing for some less computer-savvy folks, they likely don't need 500GB (or 320GB for that matter), so I'd probably pick the highest capacity single platter.

[96redformula]

I would just love to make my HTPC snappier opening and closing stuff, rebooting, etc.. RAID-0 tests would be nice to see also...

[Darakian]

I would just love to make my HTPC snappier opening and closing stuff, rebooting, etc.. RAID-0 tests would be nice to see also...

Here ya go, raid 0 tests
http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...ntus_xt_500gb/

Edit:

There's no reason to ever buy a "performance" traditional platter drive for a notebook anymore when this is on the market. There will always be a market for 3.5" storage drives (until something else replaces the technology entirely) and fully SSDs, but OEMs and notebook users ought to flock to these things.

Anybody know how many platters are on these models? I'm considering one for a build I might be doing for some less computer-savvy folks, they likely don't need 500GB (or 320GB for that matter), so I'd probably pick the highest capacity single platter.

What!? "There's no reason to buy this drive" ... "So I'm gonna buy one of these drives"

[jaredpace]

Wish WD made a hybrid SSD like this; then you could get reliability along with the speed, size & value.

[Telperion]

What!? "There's no reason to buy this drive" ... "So I'm gonna buy one of these drives"

By traditional platter drive I mean the standard dime a dozen 500GB 7200 RPM notebook drives without NAND. I don't consider this a traditional platter drive, it's an intelligent hybrid.