[Brian]

Hard drive manufacturers have seen the writing on the wall; embrace flash storage or suffer the consequences. Seagate is one of the few remaining hard drive manufacturers who haven’t released a line of consumer SSDs. Today though, they have come out with a cross between flash and magnetic storage known as a solid state hybrid drive (SSHD). The hybrid hard drive concept takes a standard spindle hard drive and adds flash and pattern recognizing software to boost drive performance with repetitive tasks. But will 4GB of flash memory sitting on top of a 7200RPM drive offer a big performance gain? Read the full Seagate Momentus XT review to find out.

Full Review

[udaman]

 Brian, on 24 May 2010 - 06:57 AM, said:

Hard drive manufacturers have seen the writing on the wall; embrace flash storage or suffer the consequences. Seagate is one of the few remaining hard drive manufacturers who haven’t released a line of consumer SSDs. Today though, they have come out with a cross between flash and magnetic storage known as a solid state hybrid drive (SSHD). The hybrid hard drive concept takes a standard spindle hard drive and adds flash and pattern recognizing software to boost drive performance with repetitive tasks. But will 4GB of flash memory sitting on top of a 7200RPM drive offer a big performance gain? Read the full Seagate Momentus XT review to find out.

Full Review

Quote

Our second real-life test covers disk activity in a productivity scenario. For all intents and purposes this test shows drive performance under normal daily activity for most users. This test includes: a three hour period operating in an office productivity environment with 32-bit Vista running Outlook 2007 connected to an Exchange server, web browsing using Chrome and IE8, editing files within Office 2007, viewing PDFs in Adobe Reader, and an hour of local music playback with two hours of additional online music via Pandora.

'real world tests' lol. &seems like you throw together a bunch of commonly used Windows progs, then say that is the way people use their computers in the 'real world'. From a stand point of consistence, for testing purposes, you get that, just like the more 'static' tests.

What I would like to see is a set recording tests that casual users can do, that can be put into a SR database. People the buy a certain drive, note their system hardware/software setup, then install these progs that record their usage over time periods, like say a week or month. Then you get 'real world' usage considerations with usable "averages" <probably end up with a wide range of statistical averages, but that would be good to know, not 'made up' scenarios...who really runs *all* of those above, at the same time, everyday???

http://news.cnet.com...20005669-1.html

Quote

With these specs, the new Momentus XT offered great performance in our tests, even faster than that of some SSDs. The best part about the drive is the price: at just around $135 for the 500GB version, the Momentus XT costs just a fraction of the price of an SSD that has just one fourth of its storage space.

^I'll assume the prices quoted in the SR article are direct from Seagate marketing?

Since the 750GB 7.2k Momentus should be shipping soon, I'd hold off on a purchase of the hybrid 500GB, to see if the gap in performance closes much vis a vis the 500GB XT vs 500GB 7200.4...many of those performance test, 'real world' included as shown in the SR review; don't seem as dramatic an increase as you would see with an SSD (keeping mind some people perceive the SSD's being only 'somewhat' faster that HDD's in their own 'real world' usage...YMMV).

[Mkruer]

WOW this is like Déjà vu. Didn't we have this discussion before. I would have gone with a 4GB DIM + a capacitor then the NAND memory then at least you could have the precived performance increase on the writes, at least up to a point.

[Brian]

Quote

^I'll assume the prices quoted in the SR article are direct from Seagate marketing?

$156 is the MSRP for the 500GB, but NE has them now for $129+$6 shipping.

Quote

Since the 750GB 7.2k Momentus should be shipping soon, I'd hold off on a purchase of the hybrid 500GB

We have one en route for review as well.

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

Does the 320 GB unit use 1 or 2 platters? The 500 GB one uses 2 I guess, so the 320 GB one would be faster. Much worse price / GB, though.

And generally: kudos to Seagate for bringing us such a drive. The notebook market seems to be the perfect place to start such a product.

And as Anand says: write caching would be sweet, but also requires a much more complex controller. Other companies already have them, but Seagate preferred the simple route here.

MrS

[compwizrd]

So what happens when you take the circuit board off the XT and stuff it on the 7200.4?

[TSullivan]

 compwizrd, on 25 May 2010 - 10:41 PM, said:

So what happens when you take the circuit board off the XT and stuff it on the 7200.4?

We have been toying with that idea to prove the point, but what if the new drive had a slightly newer revision of some part that ended up getting fried? We were hoping to get an additional drive for further testing, if we had a backup we might consider it. We just didn't want to nuke the drive before the review was finished and additional questions answered.

[Brian]

 [ETA]MrSpadge, on 25 May 2010 - 05:29 PM, said:

Does the 320 GB unit use 1 or 2 platters? The 500 GB one uses 2 I guess, so the 320 GB one would be faster. Much worse price / GB, though.

And generally: kudos to Seagate for bringing us such a drive. The notebook market seems to be the perfect place to start such a product.

And as Anand says: write caching would be sweet, but also requires a much more complex controller. Other companies already have them, but Seagate preferred the simple route here.

MrS

I had to double-check the platters with Seagate, here's the breakdown by capacity:

500GB - 2 platters (250GB each)
320GB - 2 platters (one 250GB platter, and just one side of the second platter)
250GB - 1 platter

[continuum]

I'm unclear-- did SR test the drive both in a clean, "un-learned" state as well as say after running the tests 3 times to test the "learned" state?

[TSullivan]

 continuum, on 26 May 2010 - 07:05 PM, said:

I'm unclear-- did SR test the drive both in a clean, "un-learned" state as well as say after running the tests 3 times to test the "learned" state?

Correct. The slowest recorded speed mentioned in the text is the unlearned state and the score shown in the benchmark charts are those which were seen after it had reached its peak "learned" state. Our traces are expansive enough that the drive started to show signs of caching during the first test.

The standard IOMeter and CrystalDiskMark benchmarks had no learning phase. They could be repeated over and over without any improvement since they have no defined pattern to work from.