Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drives

[sapetto]

Seagate may have delayed the funeral of traditional hard drives with the release of the Momentus XT, a marriage of a hard-disk drive (HDD) and a solid-state drive (SSD). The hybrid delivers impressive performance at a low price. Here's a rundown of the Momentus TX.

The Momentus XT is a 7200-rpm serial ATA (SATA) hard-disk drive combined with 4GB of SSD capacity and 32MB of DDR3 cache memory. Seagate claims the Momentus XT is 80 percent faster than traditional 7200-RPM drives. The Momentus XT works on PCs and Macs.
Speed tests yielded impressive results. Seagate conducted a test against three other industry-leading drives, including a pure-SSD, a 10,000-rpm Western Digital Velociraptor hard drive, and its own 7200-rpm Momentus hard-disk drive. "We booted within five seconds of a SSDs boot time, and we were 15 seconds faster than a 300GB Velociraptor and 36 seconds faster than our 7200-rpm [Momentus] drive," Mark Wojtasiak, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, told Computerworld.

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I was just browsing my local pc shop website and found the drives. Are they worth it, faster than regular HDD?

[newtekie1]

There have been a few threads about this here. The 4GB SSD is used as a big cache. IIRC, in the end it does become faster than a WD Black once the cache learns what programs you use the most.

But I think most of use would like to see a 3.5" version with a bigger SSD.

[TIGR]

Originally Posted by newtekie1

....i think most of use would like to see a 3.5" version with a bigger ssd.

+1

[dr emulator (madmax)]

dam i was hoping it was a pata drive, as i could have used it in my cctv's dvr unit

i recently tried a pata to sata converter which was rubbish, and although it worked in my old pc on a sata 3 western digital 1tb transfering old files (my old pc could only see upto 320gb ) it had terrible recording quality (flickering stuttering bad picture in the cctvs dvr)

still interesting news though

[JATownes]

This is a good idea IMO, but the cost of SSDs are dropping quick, so I think this is just a waste. For $100 you can now grab a Sandforce driven 40GB SSD, which will only drop in price in the next few months. In the end I would just grab a pair of these for RAID 0 and have more space and run circles around this drive...for the same price as the 250GB model.

[TIGR]

Originally Posted by dr emulator (madmax)

dam i was hoping it was a pata drive, as i could have used it in my cctv's dvr unit

i recently tried a pata to sata converter which was rubbish, and although it worked in my old pc on a sata 3 western digital 1tb transfering old files (my old pc could only see upto 320gb ) it had terrible recording quality (flickering stuttering bad picture in the cctvs dvr)

still interesting news though

I don't think this would make a difference for DVR anyway, which doesn't have much of a spread between frequently and infrequently accessed portions of the storage medium, so the SSD cache wouldn't really have a place.

Originally Posted by JATownes

This is a good idea IMO, but the cost of SSDs are dropping quick, so I think this is just a waste. For $100 you can now grab a Sandforce driven 40GB SSD, which will only drop in price in the next few months. In the end I would just grab a pair of these for RAID 0 and have more space and run circles around this drive...for the same price as the 250GB model.

Question—any idea how the SSD cache in these drives would work in a RAID array (off to Google I go)?