Mini-review: 4x Seagate Momentus XT in R0

[WangChung]

From my build thread:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...3&postcount=37

I'm thinking about re-testing on a separate RAID controller but I'd have to buy new HDDs as I don't want to wipe what I already have installed on these drives now. Overall, I feel it was a decent investment.

[Ao1]

Thanks for the review. As these drives don't benchmark well I think a lot of people overlook the great value these drives offer. In real life applications I'm going to guess that in a lot of instances it would be hard to tell a difference between a SSD and the Momentus.

I wonder how well they are selling.

[WangChung]

They're really great little drives. I put one in a friend's laptop, it's significantly faster than a standard drive but has tons of storage space for way less than a SSD. Honestly industry wide there should be Hybrids and SSDs for laptops, nothing else. The gain in performance versus the amount of storage is perfect!

[Vapor]

Thanks for the performance data

I have a Momentus XT in my PS3 and love it. Would put one in each of the laptops I have, but I don't use either enough (and one isn't going to live much longer) to justify it.

Anyway, good to see they're working fine in RAID, I've been semi-considering doing a 5R5 array of them. And maybe putting that array behind a 40-64GB SSD cache with SRT...

[WangChung]

We'll see how the long term plays out in RAID. I've "heard" of people having problems, but I've been going for about a month now with no issues. Apparently the issue is with APM being enabled on the drives, which currently Seageate doesn't allow to be turned permanently off at the firmware level via SeaTools. I've tried Hitachi's tool too, but didn't work. I'm still trying to contact someone at Seagate on the engineering side to see if they have something in house that I can use with a warranty waiver or something.

[NKrader]

there is so much bad ju ju behind these drives i stopped looking at em a couple months ago..

[Vapor]

We'll see how the long term plays out in RAID. I've "heard" of people having problems, but I've been going for about a month now with no issues. Apparently the issue is with APM being enabled on the drives, which currently Seageate doesn't allow to be turned permanently off at the firmware level via SeaTools. I've tried Hitachi's tool too, but didn't work. I'm still trying to contact someone at Seagate on the engineering side to see if they have something in house that I can use with a warranty waiver or something.

Yeah, I've heard the same issues and it's the big reason I'm holding back.

[WangChung]

Fortune favors the bold.

[Vapor]

But my data favors caution and consideration

[WangChung]

Well I did it, reformatted and rebuilt. And when I did so I did a proper test on the drives. This is with the new SD28 firmware, and the latest Intel drivers. Performance is up in a lot of areas, down in some. But overall, for ~$400 you can get SSD type performance with 2TB worth of storage space. Keep in mind these are the Gen 1 Momentus XT drives, now that the Gen 2 drives are out I think performance would be even better. Now the pics!

Each run was done a total of 5 times, to demonstrate the internal caching.
Atto, 1st run

Atto, 5th run


HD Tune read, 1st run

HD Tune read, 5th run


HD Tune write, 1st run

HD Tune write, 5th run


HD Tach 32mb, 1st run

HD Tach 32mb, 5th run