Scorpio Black or Travelstar or Momentus XT?

I am looking at these three 500GB 7200RPM hard drives.

Which one should I go for. Prices are comparable between the Scorpio Black and the Travelstar. The Momentus XT is considerably more expensive, almost twice as expensive as the Scorpio Black. I know the Momentus XT is fast, but is it worth twice the price of the Scorpio Black?

I am upgrading my old Thinkpad T60p. Which harddrive should I go for?

 

Momentus XT? my humble opinion is that it's worth it, you'll notice the performance improvement, one of the cheapest decent improvements you can make.

 

Did you switch to the XT from a 5400 RPM drive, a7200 RPM or something else?

 

It was a Seagate 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache - main areas of improvement once the drive is up and running are: boot time improvement, application start up time and responsiveness, some things are snappier. if you're looking for a good review, I thought this one was one of the most technical, very good testing methodology: Rage3D.com : Seagate Momentus XT Hard Drive Review [ Seagate Momentus XT Hard Drive Review ]

 

OP what are your usage and usage patterns?
if you are coming from a 5400rpm, and typically use the same programs again and again, the momentus xt will blow you away.

 

Momentus XT is probably the best option if you want things to feel snappier.

Mind you it is still a mechanical harddrive so there are obvious limitations but compared to a real SSD.

At best, it'll feel SSD like, at worst it'll still be ahead of any other hard drive.

 

The first thing I did with mine is swap out the 500Gb HDD for the Momentus XT 500Gb. It certainly feels snappier without being a dramatic improvement.

 

i'm obviously not the op, but i almost exclusively run visual studio 2010, firefox, word, and excel on my lappy. will those types of programs benefit for the xt?

also, since i'm obviously a programmer, will the drive recognize that through multiple compilations, that i'm linking to the same files over and over again and enhance my compilation speed?

 

I am upgrading from a 500GB 5400RPM HDD. Usually I just do word processing, surf the web, listen to some music and watch a couple of movies every now and then, nothing really all that intense.

But the thing that bugs me is that the Momentus XT costs twice as much as the Scorpio Black.

 

Well, think of it this way: an Intel G2 160GB SSD would be more than five times the price for a third of the space.

I don't use the XT, but if what half the users say is true, it's worth the money.

 

i have no knowledge re visual studio and compiling. but your other programs will defiitely benefit.
i use some video editing programs and adobe ae photoshop and premiere.
i definitely notice the speed of openning these programs but have noted very little performance increase while using the program except for after effects and premiere (coming from a 5400 drive).

 

The thing that you'll notice with the XT is that your system boots a lot faster and applications open faster. I'm not sure it's worth it considering your light usage pattern.

What brand and model is your 500GB?
What do you find slow in your current usage?

 

For your old thinkpad , its not worth buying an XT.. being limited to SATA I , its not worth the XT.. get the travelstar.. its more reliable than the scoripio black...

 

SATA I interface is still 150MBytes/sec, fastest transfer on the Momentus XT is just over 100MBytes/sec. Burst reads might be faster and there's overhead, but it's hardly going to bottleneck it by much if any.

 

SATA I or SATA II will hardly make a difference during normal usage. The XT will not be bottlenecked.

Edit: Like gaah already said.

 

I just placed an order for the Momentus XT. Thanks for all the help guys.

 

Phil, in which situations is burst speed important?

 

I was the one referencing the burst speed, I'm not sure exactly where it comes into play but sometimes you'll find a high performance drive with read speed bursts of around 150-200MBytes per second, and I think that happens only when the transfer begins, or the data is in the read buffer. I haven't seen much reference to it in benchmarks for the Momentus XT, if it even achieves those kinds of rates.

 

I would assume that burst speed of a normal hard drive means the speed from which the cache can be read. I'm not sure about it though.

The XT might be bottle necked very slightly in some situations. I don't think it will be significant during normal usage.

 

I recevied my Momentus XT and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Professional 64bit on my T60p.

Feels very responsive. The boot time is way down compared to my old 5400RPM HDD. Thanks for all the great advice guys.

 

Hello furrycute,

I want also to upgrade my T60p to Momentus Xt 500GB but i have read a lot of complains from this drive from Thinkpad users.

I have posted a question on Seagate site about this and the response was:

igs75 Says:
Nov 9, 2010 at 3:16 am
Dear Seagate,
I want to buy new Momentus XT for my T60p laptop , but I have read a lot posts for problems with Lenovo software like :
- Lenovo’s Thinkvantage Toolbox utility in Windows 7
- ThinkVantage Active Protection System
even after installing last firmware SD23.
Some users complain form BSOD and failures even after installing SD23 and removing LTT and ThinkVantage Active Protection System.
This means that this drive is incompatible with Lenovo ThinkPad laptops.
When this issue will be fixed?

Mark Wojtasiak Says:
Nov 9, 2010 at 10:31 am
@igs75 Hi – the issues you outline with respect to Lenovo are being worked and the fix will be available in the next couple weeks. Thanks for reading and commenting!


This is the link to site:
Momentus XT – what the experts are saying – The Storage Effect




Do you have such problems with compatibility of Momentus XT and your T60p?

I will appreciate if someone can share his experience whit Momentus XT + T60p compatibility.

Regards