Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HDD w/ built-in 4GB SSD

Seconded - I'd love someone to package £50 worth of standard 7200rpm 500GB drive and £80 worth of 64GB SSD into a single 2.5" chassis.

The resulting £130 unit would give me a 64GB SSD to hold my OS and applications, and a 500GB HD to hold my data.

I'm running this exact setup on my work DELL, having replaced the optical drive with a 2.5" SATA drive caddy - but there's no such option for my Netbooks or M11X...

I seem to remember that basic SATA doesn't support multiple units per port - so the device would need to present itself as a single 564GB unit, and rely on you partitioning it into 64GB and 500GB partitions.

 

Nonsense - you wouldn't be accessing both discs at exactly the same time, because they'd be sharing the same interface.
The SSD's advantage comes from it's seek times - even if the sequential transfer rates were throttled, it would still be more than quick enough. Witness the Intel 40GB unit rated at just 35MB/s (!!) write speed - it still annihilates even the fastest mechanical unit, when used as an OS drive.

So ? Plenty of people using SSDs are using them in conjunction with a mechanical drive - they're already making those decisions !

I would most definately try it - my Steam folder alone is around 410GB, so I'm stuck with mechanical storage only in my M11X (unless I spend a wop-jillion dollars on a 500GB SSD ). Yes, the Momentus XT would be a nice upgrade - but nowhere near as nice as an actual 64GB SSD + 500GB drive !

Absolutely - it only makes sense when you've got a single bay and nothing else.

If you've got more than one bay, then you're probably already combining mechanical and Solid State storage, and everything's working fine - the "mixed" drive wouldn't be any help

 

From now on please keep post directly on the topic of Seagate Momentus XT.

If you want to discuss the the hypothetical future of hybrid hard drives please open an appropriate topic.

 

I have a Momentus XT drive on two laptops and it's great. I also have SSD's on two laptops and they're excellent. According to test results the Momentus XT's becomes faster in booting and increased performance the longer you use it which I concur. It's a cheap alternative to a real SSD. To me it works great and that's the only thing that matters. I do recommend the Momentus XT.

 

After using the Momentus XT for more than a week now, I still have to say I love it. It outperforms my 1TB WD Caviar Blacks in both my desktops. I'm very tempted to get such a drive for my desktops as well!!

 

I installed the Momentus XT in my Dell XPS M1530 last week, and i'm very happy with it. But I do have a question...

In the Dell BIOS I noticed something called "HDD Acoustic Mode".
This field allows you to optimize your hard drives performance and acoustic noise level based on your personal preferences.

Bypass = Do nothing (needed for older drives)
Quiet = Slower, but quieter
Performance = Faster, but possibly nosier

The factory default setting is Bypass.

What do you guys recommend the settings be set at for this?

 

The XT is setup to perform in the best 'mode' Seagate thinks the drive will be used in most scenarios. I say leave it disabled.

Another data point to consider is that certain drives will ignore the Quiet and/or the Performance setting anyway - and I'm pretty sure the XT is one of those drives.

There should be no harm in trying it - but I wouldn't expect too much from this BIOS setting.

 

Yeah I enabled it to "Performance" in the BIOS. I haven't really noticed and difference, I suppose I'll just set it back to "Bypass".

Thanks

 

after using this drive for one day, i must say that everything is noticeably faster than my dead 7200.3, especially loading maps in sc2!

 

Many of the reviews on Newegg and Amazon mention that the Momentus XT is quite "noisy" and vibrates a lot. Have any of you noticed this?

 

yes, it vibrates compared to my wd black scorpio 320gb.
But still acceptable in my opinion...

 

was just wondering if anyone else was experiencing this too...

i'm getting a VERY annoying "cluck, cluck, cluck" sound from the drive, although it is relatively infrequent and not very loud, i'm wondering if this sound is normal?

 

I have the 250gb version and it is very quiet , sometimes i can hear the heads moving but it is not easy to hear them.

It does vibrate more than my previous 5400rpm hdd, and i can feel it though the parm rests, thought i have it in an 11.6" notebook.

Overall i am very happy with it`s performance

 

Hi Phill,

Would you happen to know where I can find the release notes for SD23? Or would you be able to comment on the changes?

Do you recommend the firmware upgrade for everyone?

Thanks!

 

Yes I recommend it to everyone. It's very simple and can be done on a live drive from Windows.

It apparently fixes some energy settings. I got very good battery life with it, as you can see in the review in my signature.

 

Hi Phil,

Wow, thanks for the amazingly fast reply!

And thanks for the info. I'll go ahead and install it then.

Thanks!

 

Picked up a 500GB XT today and checking with Disk Director it was showing 2 unallocated partitions of 465.8GB and 7.844GB. It seemed strange to have a small 7.844GB partition unless it serves some specific purpose.

Is there a reason for the 2 partitions and can I:
1. change BOTH of them from "unallocated"; or
2. merge them into a single partition?
Any help would be appreciated!

 

One is the physical platters (nominally 500GB as advertised).

The other is the read only NAND chips (obviously over provisioned, or at least mis-reported by Disk Director).

Don't do anything with them except install your favourite flavour of Windows.

Normally, Windows will only see the 465.8GB partition (the XT has algorithms to automatically populate the nominal 4GB nand chip optimally, for the specific use you put the drive to).

Hope you don't kill your XT!

Good luck.

 

Thanks for the really quick reply!!

I'll leave the NAND chips well alone and try not to kill the XT!

Thanks again.

 

You're welcome!

Glad I've done my good deed for today - I've saved an XT!

 

No, this really does look strange. Are you sure this is a new drive, and not a used one? To me this looks like someone mucked around with this drive before. You should only see one single unallocated partition; those drives are not supposed to exhibit their NAND cache in any way.

 

I split my XT into 2 partitioned and i only have 1, 100mb unallocated partition.

Hmm, my first hard drive on my Amiga 600 was only 20mb

 

I just checked Disk Director on my computer with XT drive and I only see both window partitions. My hdd shows 465.7 GB for the windows partition.

 

Would constantly defragging this drive automatically with a program like Diskeeper hurt this drive or its performance?

 

No problem.

PS. I personally prefer Raxco PerfectDisk.

 

The only problem with doing defrags often is that you may then also be resetting the SSD portions cache, other than that there should be no issue.......

 

That's my concern. I don't want autodefragging to reset the cache which would kill the some of performance gains of having an XT drive. Would it be best to turn off auto-defragmentation and go back to scheduling defragmentation x times/week or x times/month?

 

I have tried PerfectDisk in Stealth mode (every hour) and did not notice the XT needing to 'recalibrate' itself - it stayed fast.

However, what I mostly do is time the (manual) defragmenting to the second Tuesday of each month (MS Update day), after the updates are installed.

 

Scheduling defragmenting on MS Update day is a good idea. Thank you!

 

It probably only resets the files it actually moves. Once every hour it does little work so not too many files moved therefore not too many needing to be recached.......

 

Is it recommended to create a separate partition for the OS and another partition for your data on this drive like it's recommended on other "regular" spinning drives.

 

Yes. The first partition will be the fastest.

 

Ok, thanks! If running Win7 64-bit on this drive, what is the recommended size for the OS partition, 100 GB?

 

If you have enough space with 80GB, 100GB will be good.

 

Ok. How do I find out how much total space my OS is currently occupying? Is it just a matter of combining the sizes of my "Program Files", "Program Files (x86)" and "Windows" directories, right? I feel like I'm missing something.

 

If you have used your computer normally; then just see how big the 'users' folder is and subtract it from the total space used on the drive.

So, if you right click on C: and click properties and it says 65GB used (for example) and then you right click on the users directory and click properties and it says 15GB, then your O/S is using about 50GB - this is very rough estimate - but it is close enough when you'll be leaving 20-30GB as 'working free space' for Windows anyway.

 

I don't agree with partitioning out the drive. Partitioning a single disk is meant for providing easier data recovery should your OS drive fail. You can reload the OS on the boot partition and your data would still be be accesible. The popularity of eSATA, USB enclosures/adapters, and multi-PC households really makes this practice obsolete.

Now if you have a laptop that can take more than one drive, then it makes sense to seperate your OS/Programs and data onto seperate spindle sets. If you're going to short-stroke a RAID set for performance, that's great too if you're sure the other RAID partition isn't going to be accessed while your performance short-stroke is.

For a single spinning disk, when you partition your drive, you'll more likely than not, have a read or write or both where both partitions are requesting it at the same time. This is going to cause major slowdowns since your spindle arm can't be in two places at once. Being that the onboard flash only caches reads and not writes, I still see this as being an issue.

 

This doesn't cause a 'major slowdown' anymore than using a single partition does. That's what NCQ/ACHI is for.

What causes a major slowdown is using a single partition and allowing the O/S files to spreadout from the outer to the inner parts of the platters.

Partitioning is not solely for 'easier data recovery'. Used intelligently, it will also give you the best and most consistent performance that your HD is capable of offering.

If you're running Vista or Win7 and your drive is less than 50% filled; try shrinking the partition and see if it is not noticeable.

If you're able to shrink the partition to 1/5 or less of the drives capacity the newfound 'snap' the computer has will be eye opening indeed.

 

I've never partitioned a drive before so I'm going to give it a try. I need all of the "snap" that I can get!

 

Well, yeah, if you're not going to put any data on the other partition and access it, then yes, you're right. I don't see the point of that, just get a small 30 or 60 gig high-performance SSD for the same price.

 

Thanks. I have 158 GB used on my c:drive. My users directory is using 118 GB. This leaves 40 GB for my OS. Does this number sound about right for Win7 64-bit?

 

So my 320 Gig Toshiba in my Envy 14 is dying. or something. (I'm still not 100% sure what's going on). HP's hdd bios test says the hard-drive has an error.

Whatever that error is causes windows to hard freeze from time to time. Usually I think it's caused by writing new files (or well it happens more often then not when I download something). But sometimes it'll just freeze while browsing firefox.



Anyway I'm looking for a new hdd. I wanted to wait on the intel SSD refresh but it's starting to hard freeze more often so I've decided to just get a new hdd anyway.

So how's this thing compare to a 7200 rpm hdd (like the WD Scorpio Black or something)

 

See here: SSD vs Hard Drives: A Beginner's Guide to SSD Upgrades

 

So I got my RMA replacement, and so far it's running smooth. Came with the latest firmware. Temperatures were around 39c, the same as my old HDD. No noticeable vibration, although I can hear the drive when it's writing, but that is probably due to it being a faster HDD?

The first time I ran Starcraft 2 it took 37 seconds to load to the movie. After that, it took 7 seconds to get to the main menu. With the old 5400 RPM HDD I was seeing 20+ second loads. So far I'm loving it.

Is there a possibility of performance loss using Intel RST drivers? I read somewhere there are minimal performance gains, but I don't want to install it if there's any loss.

 

I installed my new Momentus XT 500GB HDD a couple weeks ago, but never partitioned it. Do you guys recommend this for the best performance possible?

If so, do I partition Windows 7 separately from all my programs as well or just my data?
Also, could this be done in Windows 7, or should I reinstall everything?

 

Imho it does little good performance-wise.
Some people like to be very organized, you might do it for that reason.

 

oh ok, because someone on page 54 wrote that putting the OS on a seperate partition would give better performance.

 

The idea is to speed up the OS and programs in the HDD section by short stoking it and lowering the OS and primary programs HDD seeks. This way your data work and other files do not spread the files across the drive increasing system seek times on the platters.

While it will increase the one seek when you say access an Excel file you need to work on it only increases the one seek. the system has to access thousands of system files while booting and running. If you lower the spreading of these files lowering those seeks overall you get a better system.

Edit; just to note I short stroked the c:\ as 124 GB with the rest as data and it shortened boot timer, in the windows boot time thread, from 12.1 to 10.5 seconds. So proof is in the pudding as they say...........

 

I say it does improve performance. Read, write speeds and access times are fastest on the first part of the disk.

I usually keep the first 100GB for the files that I use most frequently (OS, programs, some data).

 

Is the improved performance really noticeable to the naked eye?