Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive
Nov 29, 2011 by CGP Staff
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Seagate seems to be optimizing its hybrid drives, delivering close to SSD performance. Avram Piltch reviews Seagate’s Momentus XT hybrid drive for Laptop Magazine: “booted more than twice as fast as the standard 7,200-rpm hard drive. Going from nearly 1.5 minutes to just over 30 seconds is nothing to sneeze at.” More at Laptop Magazine.
I replaced a 7200 rpm drive with the M XT as my boot drive and saw no speed bump in boot or apps.
Hi Mick. That’s rather strange. I wonder why. I’m sure you did several tests with it… Anyway, good to hear another view on the drive’s performance.
I have a few of these drives. I only use them as App drives not OS, after the first boot of max, which is slightly faster than a standard 7200 about 35 seconds on my machine, subsequent boots are an noticeably faster, typically >10 seconds.
I have run cache tests on them too without much difference than a standard drive unless the cache is smaller than 4gb. It seems the ssd cache needs repeated accesses to files in order for it to fill. Whatever the most frequently accessed files are seem to be what gets loaded into the ram buffer.
Personally it is a decent 500gb 2.5″ drive for the $90.00 I paid for each. They are currently a lot more expensive now, nearly twice as much on Newegg ($160.00).
I’m not the only one disappointed with this product. Just checkout the seagate forums.
Seagate was dragging there feet on a driver up date. I waited months and it never came. I had a long talk with a seagate rep about the M-XT. He said they were having real trouble with the software drivers.
The drive has a mind of it’s own. The random spinning up and down sucks. I also don’t like the drive sound, much loader then the hitachi it replaced.