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

I was initially shocked at how great those figures were, then realized this is a Caviar Black 3.5" hdd.

 

Retesting, I will repost later

 

Hmm, how do you set up a comparison like this and include the Hitachi 7k but not the Scorpio Black?

This review does not flatter the XT very well. Is it a review conducted in 2009 or a review of 2009 models w/o current firmware? The Scorpio Black proves to be quicker in the majority of tests. One would think that the XT with twice the cache, NAND and a pretty quick base drive (7200.4) it would at least be ahead, if not far ahead.

I don't mind waiting an extra 10 seconds (or 1.1 according to the review) for Windows to boot if it means having a quicker drive for all other usage. The Scorpio Black used less power and is half the price as well. Possibly the review only did one run of the XT so it couldn't learn the testing sequence? I dunno. The reviews I've read on the XT have been either sensational improvements after 3 or 4 boot ups, or just mild gains. OS startup seems to be where the drive really shines though. Users seem to love it and but I wonder (and no offense to anyone) how much is perceived performance. I was ready to order an XT but after some more reading around, I'm reconsidering more and more the Scorpio Black, especially at $50 less.

Here's a May 2010 review that shows the XT against the WD (why use a 320gb for a comparison test when a 500 is available ) and the 7200.4 again, plus a Velociraptor. The XT comes out on top of the Scorpio and the other Seagate. They even report a mere .5w at idle vs 1.3 in the TH review. Maybe it's a case of ordering both, using it for a few weeks and returning whichever I feel isn't worth keeping.

 

I would be eager to hear from you and other users who have experience with both the XT and the Scorpio Black, which do you find quicker, quieter and cooler for everyday use before and after boot up.

 

In benchmarks, the XT may seem like a waste of money.

I bought one not to benchmark it to see if it was faster, I bought it to compare to the 7K500 I was using.

The 7K500 has never returned in to the notebook since.

Real use, no gimmicks.

Even launches PS CS5 faster than a SandForce based Inferno in a better (i3 based) system. (4 seconds XT vs. 8 seconds Inferno).

Well worth the extra money I paid for it.

Easily.

 

If you want a review with the 500GB Black vs. the XT in a notebook:
SSD vs Hard Drives: Performance Tests and Conclusion

 

How can it be faster than the Inferno? That has to be a system related issue because a hybrid SSD cant be faster than a full SSD unless said SSD is super slow and the Inferno is not one of the slow ones.

Besides what happened to the "everything opens instantly" talk of all the SSD owners 8 seconds to open photoshop is far from instant, thats close to how long it takes for me to open it on my regular HDD.

 

i concur with the 4 secs photoshop cs5 startup, and i have 6 additional plugins for this

 

100% agreed, a Patriot Inferno will always do everything faster than a XT unless there's something wrong with the system.

 

That talk was always nonsense. First of all, while SSDs are fast, they still have a finite transfer rate, and so does the SATA interface, by the way. Second, startup time is not only dependent on disk transfer rates, but also processor speed. It all depends on how many CPU cycles an application will consume before it displays its splash screen or application window(s). Some heavily Java-based applications, in particular, may take quite a while to start up, no matter how fast the disk they are on might be.

 

I emailed Seagate Tech Support and asked if I would see any extra benefits using the Momentus XT as a secondary drive with games and media on it, this is the reply;

1. Dear flynnaz:

I am sorry to say, not really. You will see a benefit of having it as your OS drive for access of that but for games, no it will not make that big a difference in accessing data off your internal computer hard drives.

Hope this helps

and I sent it twice by mistake, so her is the second reply, I am not sure I agree since I have many games on my D: drive;

2. Dear flynnaz,

Thank you for contacting Seagate Technical Support.

By using this drive as another drive in the system it provides more capacity for the laptop to have more things on it. As for installing games on the drive you will want to make sure the games are installed to the drive that has an operating system. Many games these days have to rely heavily on the operating system and some of its components to run properly. Furthermore, some games will only install to the C directory.

 

LOLWUT?

"Many games these days have to rely heavily on the operating system and some of its components to run properly. Furthermore, some games will only install to the C directory."

I have ALL my games on the D: drive, they may rely on specific system dll's but they have a lot of their own library files. If the 4GB NAND basically caches most frequently used files as they claim, it should load a game and levels faster if you play a certain game frequently.

It's really access times. I was very sceptical of SSD's in the beginning so I ordered an Intel 80GB for my gaming desktop to replace my aging four plus year old Raptor 150GB just to see for myself. I didn't see any real significant performance improvements. Then I started using my other desktop and laptop with a traditional HDD after using that desktop for a while and the difference is noticable. I think it's one of those things that you don't notice specifically except maybe faster boot times, until you go back and use the "old" tech then it just feels slow.

 

So moral of the story, don't get an SSD in the first place?

 

That's kinda where I am with the XT at this point. I've already got a pretty quick 7200rpm drive so will the difference be worth the $120, plus possible RMA if I decide not to keep it? That's more a personal decision but a strong factor.

Most if not all users I've read who report the biggest WOW effect are upgrading from an older 5400rpm hdd and are also getting an extra 150+gb of storage. That is definitely worth the money. Those coming from a more modern 7200 are a bit calmer. I just prefer checking things out for myself so I'd like to feel first hand the differences of the Scorpio Black and the XT. I'll probably go that route and return one after 3 weeks or so.

 

Thankfully not everybody do like you otherwise stuff would be more expensive to cover the opened box loss & handling cost. Somebody has to pay for that in the end.

 

Results of my Momentus XT 500gb, is this good?

 

Actually looks good. Looks better than mine with 4k, yours is twice as good actually. I'm wondering why that is now.

 

Here is my first 64GB partition (only 3% used) of the 500GB XT with the stamatisx and JJB tweaks.

Left image with no tweaks, right image with both tweaks used.

See:

 

Mine is a secondary drive/ data, could that effet the results?

 

flynnaz try this line in your registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm
Change on Start from 3 to 4
Reboot.

Rerun CDM.

PS. I just ordered a 250GB XT myself. Looking forward to see if it's as quiet as they say.

 

What will this do, help my SSD, or Momentus XT? Or both?

 

Maybe both.

Tiller got a nice improvement on his XT.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...ybrid-hdd-w-built-4gb-ssd-77.html#post6734200

 

Sweet, I will try it when I get home today, thank you.

 

Mine is also a secondary data drive. I always seem to get lower scores on my ssd's than everyone else. Desktop or laptop. I don't get it.

And doesn't that tweak raise CPU temps?

 

It can but you can use the tweak first to establish whether your laptop is affected.

If it is, there are other steps to take.

 

trust me.. it runs fairly quiet but if it decides to click , it clicks loudly..

 

Found this on Ben's Bargins;

SuperBiiz has the Seagate ST95005620AS Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive for $130 - $15 off with coupon code FALL15 [Exp 9/26] = $115 with free shipping. Features SSD-like performance with hard drive capacity, Adaptive Memory technology to optimize performance, and claims 80 percent faster performance than traditional 7200RPM drives in benchmark scores.

link:
ST95005620AS Seagate 500GB (ST95005620AS) 7200rpm SATA2 32MB Solid State Hybrid Drive (2.5 inch) - Notebook Hard Drives - SuperBiiz.com

 

nice one... good u got it! Enjoy

 

unbeknownst to Wingnut, his little kids are sneaking out of their bedrooms during the night to sabotage his computers. Kekekekeke.

On a side note, I feel your pain. Back with my old G51vx, I never seemed to get the 4k numbers everyone else seemed to be getting with my Intel G2.

 

I am really on the fence, if I should clone my Momentus XT, and put a 7200 500gb reg drive in my M17x, in the momentus's place, and use the Momentus in my wife's M11X? Or just buy another, $115.00 right now

 

Does your wife need the extra performance?

 

No, but she's Impatient , and I use it too.

 

Ha ha... lol...


Then you're not on the fence... when are you doing it?

 

i got between 20-21 second bootups when my xt had 95gig free; but now with 65gig free i get 25-26 seconds.

...well just an fyi; but it does seem like disc space has a significant impact on bootup/drive performance

 

trvelbug,

are you running PerfectDisk 11?

 

no, i use the free version of auslogics disk defrag to optimize and defrag

 

Sometimes free is good and even great (MSE), but does your's allow you to defrag the 'unmoveable' files?

More importantly, does it allow you to set up the files like this?

With this setup, most new files are written to the 16GB free space that PD reserves for the new files. But, most importantly, all the 'read only' data is relegated to the middle/end of the HD and doesn't affect boot up times as drastically as you've seen.

Download a trial of PD11 Professional and see if it gets your boot times back to where they were.

See:

 

Here is my results after doing the regedit,
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Intelppm
Change on Start from 3 to 4
Reboot.

and "check turnoff windows write-caching buffer flushing" on hardware properties on the hard drive it's self, for both my SSD and Momentus XT. I forgot to do that, lol

First run first not much diffrence from what I see, can someone post a normale 7200rpm drive to compare?.

 

i actually have the trial v installed upon your recommendation a few days ago but havent had time to play around with it.
there were many more options, some of which i wasnt familiar with.
if you could provide me with a simple workflow of what optimizations to do first and which to leave off, it would be much appreciated.

cheers

 

flynazz,

In this post:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/6734200-post768.html


I have used both the stamatisx tweak you have used and the JJB tweaks together.

I also do not touch the 'turn off windows write-caching buffer flushing' option (I leave it unchecked) as it consistently makes a negative impact on real world performance (no matter what benchmarks say).

Also of note is that I'm running 9 runs at 50MB size too. Maybe that makes a difference.


For a not very pretty (no images, just data from CDM beta) 7K500 benchmarks:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...chi-hts725050a9a364-aka-7k500-benchmarks.html


Hope this helps.

Cheers

 

Thank you for the information.

 

Make sure you have disabled Windows and the auslogic's defragger from doing any automatic defrags.

Now, start PD and select PerfectDisk Settings on the Defragmentation page.

Select 'Let PD manage all the layout ini files'.

Second, double click on the C: drive and select the Smart Placement tab on the far left. Now set all the Data Layout options as I have shown in the image in the previous post.

Third, click on the Boot Time checkbox on the main PD defrag window to select (check) it.

Now, click Start for a smart placement defrag, then reboot the computer and once it has rebooted, do one more smart placement defrag.

A couple of reboots (with a 15 or 20 minute wait between reboots so that the 'nand' can cache the new file locations properly) should bring your startup times close to where they were (if not faster than before).

Remember to not defrag too often with an XT - it forces the 'nand' to re-cache all the files it was previously tracking. Once a month (Microsoft Update day - 2nd tuesdays of every month - should be more than enough defragging with the above PD11 settings to keep the drive at peak performance.

Cheers!

 

Here is my Momentus XT 500gb on my M17X R2, and 7200rpm 250gb drive on my m11x R1(sorry for the small pic);

 

hey thanks tiller i will try that out this weekend when i have more time
+1

 

Too often a defrag forces the recache of the files that are moved, not the entire cache. It will have some hit at first reorganization ubt not a major one. It more is that you no longer need frequent defrags to keep your system running great as even i it does move out a few boot files it will then tend to cache these keeping the system running smooth.

Also since you defrag less even in the background you save the system frm the times it would degrag while you were using it or even having to keep it up and running to auto defrag at night. Since AV's tend to scan faster etc. other background items are accomplished more easily too. In general you have a much nicer overall machine.

To me if you are going 7,200 RPM the 50 or so premium for the XT is a no brainer for the primary drive. Where else for that money can you get the experience difference it has to offer? For the secondary drive though this becomes a harder decission..........

 

i did one pass of smart placement defrag with boot time using your settings. however it seemed that it placed my media and torrents in the recently modified section.
when i open my apps now they seem a little more sluggish, possibly owing to their placement in the hdd. boot time remained essentially the same as before.
is there a way to assigned my most used programs to the recently modified section instead of pd11 prioritizing media?

 

To anyone who owns an XT, I'm wondering what benefit it provides with respect to boot times vis a vis a decent 7200 RPM HDD. I've just run Boot Timer five times consecutively (and several times before that), and come out with an average boot time of 22.688 seconds. How much, in your experience, can I expect to improve on that time with the XT?

Note: My HDD is a Seagate Momentus 7200RPM, with a 320GB capacity.

 

22.6 is as fast as my SSD, that's pretty fast, I am putting a XT in my M11X this week, I hope I get that kind of boot speed.

 

Have you measured your boot times with Boot Timer? Your system should be crushing mine, unless you load an exceptional number of applications at startup.

 

63.3 using boot timer with my m11x and a 7200 250gb, 22. on my m17x r2 vertex 2 120gb. I have normal programs loading, nothing extra, nothing taken off.