Seagate's Momentus XT a Perfect Hybrid between a HDD and a flash memory drive.
A few years ago it seemed as if Hybrid Hard Drives were a myth. Today the market prevails in two segments if we talk about personal data storage. HDD and SDD's namely, HDD's are commonly known amongst people as the drives for PC's and laptops with huge capacity and cheap. SDD's comparatively are commonly very expensive and only have a limited capacity.
For the very portable users that don't want to lug around another hard drive, or for those who refuse to pay the high Price per GB rates that SSDs command, there hasn't really been an option other than mechanical storage.How cool would it be if we could integrate the huge capacity of HDD’s and the speed of SDD’s?
Seagate is attempting to change that with its latest H - HDD: the Momentus XT.
Now H-HDD’s were introduced in 2007 and weren’t that versatile not did they benefit because of their support for a definite OS. Today Seagate unveils a new type of hybrid that is similar to the initial H-HDD concept. However, the new Momentus XT does not rely on operating system support, and hence should be more versatile.While the hybrid hard drive idea hasn't lead to much awe or success in the past, Seagate's Momentus XT promises to change that thought by using smarter processing and algorithms with a much larger 4GB SLC buffer. Seagate hasn’t come out and made any claims that it will smoke the latest SSDs but what they are pushing is a better user experience. With common recurring tasks such as booting your system, launching the same game, or opening the same program the new Momentus XT is able to offer greater speeds than even 10,000RPM hard drives.
The Seagate Momentus XT comes in three capacities, 250GB (ST92505610AS), 320GB (ST93205620AS) and 500GB (ST95005620AS).The Seagate Momentus XT HDD/SSD hybrid drive doesn’t really look that much different than a normal hard drive. The drive has the standard Seagate drive appearance with a simple all-white label on top of a minimalistic silver cover and black metal body. To the naked eye nothing about this drive indicates that it is unlike any other notebook drive on the market.Seagate offers the same 5-year warranty on the Momentus XT as they do on all their other spindle hard drives. Compared to solid state drives with an average warranty length of 3-years this means they put more trust in their drive and its lifespan.The Seagate Momentus XT is an excellent notebook hard drive and under the right circumstances surpasses drives well out of its class. The 4GB of cache helps to significantly improve the access of common read/write patterns that a user might see in their daily routine. At its worst it still offers a significant boost in performance over its older 7200.4 brother, but at its best it outperforms even the 10,000RPM Western Digital Velociraptor desktop hard drive.
Conclusion:
An SSD doesn't make sense for everyone; a drive that costs more than the notebook it's in isn't practical for most users. The Seagate Momentus XT manages to crank out more performance than any other notebook hard drive on the market, while keeping prices reasonable and capacities high. If you're looking for more speed in your regular computing activities, there's no faster hard drive on the market.
