Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid - Good SSD alternative?

I am curious if the hybrid drive is a good alternative for an ssd considering the price per GB point. I have read several reviews and it looks like the transfer rates isnt that much faster than an hdd. For those of you who own these, whats your experience?

 

I have one and it is pretty snappy.
I get to my desktop on a cold boot in 45 seconds and sometimes as low as 38
Not sure if it is worth it, work paid for mine, so I may not have got one otherwise.

 

Two of these in RAID0 is supposedly as fast as an average SSD. Basically you'd have a 1TB SSD. A single XT though, not interested.

 

yup but raid with this drive is hit or miss some time it scew up bad

 

No it's not, the one I have in my M17x is a lot slower than the Intel X25M G2 I used to have in my older R2.

 

I know they are not as fast as SSD, even in Raid 0. But are they a good middle ground? as in much faster than HDD?

 

I honestly don't notice the difference between this drive and a regular 7200 rpm drive. IMO it's not a good middle ground, if you want speed, get an SSD.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't call it a middle ground either. IMHO, with the G3 almost here, one can expect to see the G2 prices slashed...hopefully

 

I never owned XT. But, if you have room for only 1 HD in your laptop and you really need big (~500GB) storage space, I think it's a good choice. But if you don't need all that space, or you have m17x , you can simply have 1 SSD and 1 HD for storage. That's what I have.

 

Same as me except my 160GB HDD is a tad small :[ Need a bigger one

 

Ah yeah, I am all over the place with HDs. Besides what I have in my sig, I still have some stuff on my 250GB HD in m11x, then some on 160GB portable HD and on 250GB 3.5" HD on my old desktop that serves as a home server. Not to mention 40GB HD on my office computer with some work stuff I never bothered to copy and another 3.5" "portable" 160GB that's like a brick that I used to transfer files between my research lab and my office computer....

Just a little off-topic. I found SyncToy to be very useful when syncing My Documents across different computers... especially with SSDs. You can see why I need it.

 

I put one in my Sons Inspiron laptop, and if made boot up times much faster

 

OK, I'll bite, whats G2 and G3?

 

I've had both, if you're feeling frugal then splurge on the ssd.

 

HUH?

 

He's referring to the Intel SSD's. G2 are the newest ones and G3 are due out soon.

 

I actually looked at a few benchmarks, and the XT in RAID0 is NOT as fast as even a crappy SSD. I could have sworn I read that somewhere. Good catch Joker.

 

For those of you who have experienced true SSD, then yes the XT wont mean much. But for those of use who are frugal, never had one, and need that space then yes the XT definitly feels faster - especially boot and load times for those progams you use every day. The NAND on board is a little stingy at 4GB, but for booting windows, office, internet and your favorite game I say it helps allot.

My boot time dropped from 30 sec to 4.

My DAO load times droped from 1min20 to 25 sec. (i use allot of mods)

Office droped from 7 sec to 1 sec.

Firefox with saved pages dropped from 45 sec to 20.

So for me, it is worth it over a normal drive.

 

Man, if anything this thread is selling me on getting a regular SSD and moving my 500gb to the secondary HDD slot.

 

And that, my friend, is what most people do

 

I have a SSD in primary and will be getting one these for my secondary slot on my system, will see how it performs. Should be here on 11/10 according to UPS tracking.