News - Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive hits the test bench

[HEXUS]

The hard-disk drive is dead. Long live the hard-disk drive?

Read more.

[nibbler]

Looks good if the price is right...
I think this could be what I've been waiting for.

[Crazytom]

Definitely looks good, seems to strike a decent balance between performance, capacity, and price.

[miniyazz]

Looks good, this could take off in a big way.
But...

with Adaptive Memory monitoring your usage, performance should increase over time - and let's face it, the same can't be said for most SSDs.

Is that possibly because SSDs have all their data stored on this new uber-quick flash? So performance starts off better than this can ever get? Not to mention Trim, which is now pretty much standard on all recent drives and goes a long way to prevent any performance degradation.

I wonder what the lifespan is like on these drives. It seems like a lot of data could be copied onto the 4GB, depending on how the Adaptive Monitoring thing works, and there can't be a lot of buffering with extra unreported space.

[borandi]

New laptop drive anyone?

[Biscuit]

as soon as scan gets these in im getting 2 x 250 for RAID 0

End of

[Ciber]

Very interesting. It's a toss up for me now whether my next upgrade will be a second faster SSD or one of these.

[scaryjim]

About time too

100% SSD makes sense for absolute enthusiasts and in the enterprise market, but what makes sense for consumers is lots of hard drive storage that intelligently remembers which files we use more often and mirrors them onto a small SSD to give that little bit of speed boost.

My only question would be what this does to pagefile. Presumably it's a regularly accessed file, but given that most systems these days proesumably have 4GB or more of pagefile, how does the adaptive technology deal with that?

However, since seagate have shown the way I can only assume that we'll start seeing more of this type of hybrid drive, presumably with steadily increasing SSD capacities. I have to say, my next recommendation for an enthusiast system will be two of these in RAID 0. Only question now is how long before Seagate start marketing special RAID caddies that'll take two of these and fit in a 3.5" drive bay

[TooNice]

Still choke in 4k random read/write, but this is perfect for laptops. That said I'll probably miss this generation just to let others 'test' it first (given that hybrid drives are arguably even less mature than SSD But if successful, this might just make the 2nd Gen Velociraptor the last.

[Biscuit]

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_review

is a decent read

[drunkenmaster]

Completely worthless, read the actual review and pay attention to the real world use situations that show the ssd's from mechanical drives, random performance, small file, etc, etc. Crystal disk mark, random performance the momentus sucks just as bad as a normal mechanical drive and the 7200.11 isn't anywhere near the fastest one around.

Not to mention the 7200.11 has something wrong with it/the setup, 10% cpu utilisation, on a mechanical drive, something else is drastically wrong there. Sequential read speeds only getting 88mb's on the momentus, and double that in raid, a pair of ANY hdd's will hit 100-110mb/s sequential in Crystal disk mark, and very very close to double that in raid.

AS SSD is a very good indicator of real world performance

http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...xt_500gb/8.htm

Theres several things to note, that 7200.11 Seagate is performing WAY under where it should, again sequential on a last gen drive, it should be somewhere around 100mb/s and it SHOULD be beating the momentus as sequential won't gain anything by being cached into a large block of flash memory, its limited purely by being a 2.5" drive, the rotational speed at the edge of a platter in a bigger drive is a LOT higher so you can read more quickly off them. Theres not a chance in hell the 3.5" drive loses that bench, at all, in any way, any drive produced in the past 4 years should get 85mb/s + for sequential read/writes

In the small file numbers, the momentus dies in exactly the same way the non SLC drive does.

Access times suck when its tested heavily on random read/writes, the drive is completely crap according to AS SSD and its the most accurate(followed by Crystal) in showing real world performance.

Keep in mind, ALL those SSD's are vastly underperforming aswell.

Firstly a Vertex 2(and really all ssd's) have faster 4kb random writes, than reads, a Vertex is closed to 28mb/s reads and more on writes, the sequential write numbers are half what they should be(though probably on a heavily used Vertex 2 with trim not working well yet, maybe accurate).

The 4kb-threaded results are the MOST important, its where ssd's plus thread ordering and low access all come together to be the SINGLE reason SSD's wipe the floor with mechanical drives, the momentus fails miserably and the SSD's, are not at all tweaked there. A Crucial C300 in 4kb threaded, will score 200-250mb/s depending on the controller, a Vertex 2 would be around 150mb/s.

The numbers in that review are bad, and they still wipe the floor with the momentus, its no where near ssd performance and anyone that gets one will be seriously dissappointed.

So factor in 3 things, the Seagate isn't the fastest drive and is showing numbers WAY below what it should, the SSD's are all showing numbers below what they should and the single fastest drive(which costs no more than the Intel or OCZ/anything else) is WAY above those results aswell, its worthless.

I really wouldn't be duped into buying one, if you NEED Hard drive performance, get an SSD, if you don't, don't pretend you do and waste money on niche products, get a couple cheap big drives for raid 0, a couple F3's, western digi's or hitachi's(just because they've ALWAYS been awesome in raid 0) and get much more value for your money.

[[GSV]Trig]

Certainly a good idea, perhaps WD will do something similar with the next gen raptor to keep it at the top of the mechanical pile?

[Platinum]

Just ordered a couple, should give me some nice performance when raided

[1stRaven]

Just ordered a couple, should give me some nice performance when raided

Two of my drives went poof tonight and I was going to order a couple to replace my current raid 0 array but couldn't find them in stock at dabs etc. In the end, I've gone for 4 quick 500gb drives to raid up but would be interest to know how you get on with these drives.