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]

....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 cry 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]

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 cry 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.

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)?