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

go to eBay or Craigslist. I picked one of those up for $340.

 

YouTube - Seagate Momentus XT!

Interesting video...not sure if all their figures are right as I counted 20sec between when the SSD finished with the time screen showing to where the XT showed it, they said 14seconds, but whatever.

Huge huge difference between it and the 5400rpm drive...

I'm wondering though, if this was on it's first run or after multiple runs, I'm assuming on it's first run, so it would run even faster after a few runs...especially considering I mainly use the same few programs over and over, that's a huge thing in my book.

 

I'm interested in what happens if you're running multiple OSes. will it "learn" in that scenario? or will it act more like a normal HDD because of the switching back and forth?

 

my interest here is longevity. Since the SSD only is a 4 gig section there is probably lot of writing internally to the SSD section. I would imgine this could kill the drive rather rapidly unless maybe the SSD section is just reserved for small files and the higher IOPS.........

 

It's a read cache not a write cache, so there won't be read / write / erase cycles like a normal SSD would have. On top of that, it's SLC, so even if it were undergoing write cycles the life span of 4GB of SLC is about what you'd get from 400GB of MLC NAND.

 

there wont be an ssd partition alongside a platter partition. its all one drive.

 

Well I would agree if it wasn't for the battery life. Tom's Hardware posted a benchmark where they got 50 minutes less battery life, on 7 hours vs. the Seagate 7200.4. This is measured with a synthetic benchmark though. I'm looking forward to hear real life experiences.

It's possible that you might even loose more battery life if you're 5400rpm drive is very power efficient. I'm expecting Laptopmag to come with their review soon, which will include real life battery life numbers, I hope.

It's also possible that the single platter 250GB Momentus XT will be more power efficient.

They say it will be used for the most used files. So it will depend on how often you use the secondary OS.

 

I see. I'll have to buy one just to see if it will work for me, to be honest. this option would spare my superdrive and save me about $300, net.

if it's good enough, that SSD might be going on sale.

 

if this came out 3 months ago i would've jumped on it no sweat, now I have to wait to see how prices adjust with intel's new offerings come Q3 this year

 

Newegg has it for $129. Shipping in two days, ETA:05/27/2010
Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

Look at how it learns the PC Mark Vantage benchmark, getting faster over time:



Source

 

very cool.

I'm going to sleep on this tonight. but I'm about 90% sure that I'll be pre-ordering in the morning.

edit: pre-ordered just now. lol

 

Pre-order's sold out, this looks awesome. It's going to be very similar to Intel's Turbo Memory system, but with less user configurability.. With Turbo Memory, the flash is it's own separate hardware, and in software it uses ReadyDrive (which isn't the same as ReadyBoost) to cache the most used data for lower latency and faster access, but it also had "User-pinning" where you can manually select files to store in flash.

why this is beneficial is because the operating system/program will spend less time waiting for data/program to load, and whatever gets stored in flash should be a lot more responsive and in some cases load instantly...

Amazon has them for pre-order (newegg is sold out):

250GB: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momen...3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1274776800&sr=8-3
320GB: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momen...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1274776800&sr=8-1
500GB: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momen...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1274776800&sr=8-2

 

if anyone gets i'd like to see benchmarks after its been used a bit. because that flash memory has to kick in. make sure if your gonna benchmark reset the comp a few times. i hope this actually works as advertised because if it does, then it's gonna be pretty good for people who cant afford an SSD.

 

Don't know if you know but there's already 10+ sites with benchmarks. Google will show them.

Anandtech and Laptopmag are the most interesting imo.

 

Wow...in looking over that Tom's review...it appears the battery life estimates represent the only part of their review worth considering!

their benchmarking technique, while proper for all other HDDs, is completely inappropriate for figuring out the performance benefits of this technology. after all, you have to run this new technology multiple times before you see it shine. for all we know, Tom's only ran those benchmarks once, never giving the HDD time to "learn and adapt". ugh.

anyway, I'm excited about my pre-order. I hope it works out...and I hope dual-booting doesn't make that 4GB of flash ram too small to effectively cash data from 2 OSes. we'll see soon enough! I'll once again be doing extensive benchmarking. dual-booting SSD vs. Momentus XT and seeing how multiple boots into one OS effect the other OS after a few times.

should be fun.

 

It actually even puts the battery life estimates into question as well... I'd suspect that the drive uses more power as it's caching new files to the SSD, so the initial runs could quite easily have more power used. I'm taking Tom's battery life results with a big handful of salt until someone more reputable like Anand does some battery life testing.

 

Because it is new(ish) technology, it's tough to really benchmark them until they start falling into user's hands in the next week or so.

I do like the concept, if they work as advertised I will certainly be an early adopter.

 

Just linking the Anand review, as my post has been made obsolete by above.

Seagate's Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

 

Just pre-ordered a pair of 500GB Momentus XTs from Amazon, $137 a pop. I'll put them in a matrix-RAID config in my M6400, which should give me a very nice performance boost, with no sacrifice in storage space, at a very reasonable price. We'll see how it goes...

 

Has anyone managed to get one of these yet, and try it out?

Thanks!

 

Id not go out and buy one of these, but price is reasonable.

The great thing though is they come stock in the Asus G73 now! Thats my laptop.... :/

 

i'd get this when i get my G73 but only thing making me worry is that it contains the momentus drives which like failing IMO.. so this is making me thing again but the performance is ooh.. is there more benchmarks other than boot times?

 

Yes, I agree, I was really upset with all the firmware issues Seagate drives had in the last couple of years. I was definitely affected... 3 drives on my server needed to be upgraded.

But, I think it's great that Seagate came up with such an innovative solution for people who need alaptop drive space greater than say 200GB, and who don't want to pay enormous amounts of money.

All the reviews that I've read have been very positive. In particular, I liked Anandtech's application launch tests that I've attached.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to be an early adapter.

 

I'm really interested in it. Anyone knows how the drive actually caches the files?

I mean the algorithm... that is what will happen after a format or when you defrag the drive frequently?

In the first case there will be a lot (say all) file missing on the drive, that is a lot of activity for the controller for every cache miss. In the second, when you defrag daily, you will have many cached unuseful files in it?

Of course i think this is totally transparent to the user... no way to set a preferred folder/files/pattern or whatever due to a software layer complexity?

 

As far as I know the intelligence in the controller copies the most used files to the SSD. The user has nothing to say over it.

I don't see why defragging would be a problem for that.

 

When I think hybrid SSD/HD, I think two separate volumes (32-64GB SSD and some big HDD) in one enclosure... but I doubt that's possible without custom firmware.

 

This is tempting. Been reading around about it and it seems like a good deal. Maybe I'll wait for news about its fail rate, but by then something new will probably come out.

This or an SSD (and bankruptcy)... hmmm...

 

That is what it is physically. But as far as the software is concerned, the SSD is invisible. Just like the operating system has no vision into the memory cache on a hard drive. This is just another level of caching, that's bigger than the fast memory, but slightly slower. But it's MUCH faster than the spinning drive, which is the point.

 

Cnet posted their review too. Booting in 12 seconds and outpacing the Velociraptor in a few tests, it's looking very good.

Seagate Momentus XT (500GB) Hard Drive reviews - CNET Reviews

 

but how does it do in general -performance like loading etc?

 

Fast. Check the Laptopmag preview.

 

The reviews for this drive seem outstanding.

I'm waiting to see what the end-users experience.

Impact on battery life and speed increases.

I currently have a Volacious Raptor in my desktop, and it is great. I don't need the xt to match the performance, but getting close would be great. When I work on laptops, I get very frustrated with slow performance times in applications (from launch to regular work).

The 320 would be perfect...

 

I prefer the 250GB because it only has one platter, which usually results in lower acces time and slightly lower power consumption.

The 320GB has two platters like the 500GB. For that price you may as well buy the 500GB.

 

Well, there's the issue of platter density - higher platter density will typically mean higher throughput, which means the 500GB and 250GB should have higher throughput than the 320GB drive.

I'm not sure about single-platter drives generally having lower latency, though. I'd pick the 500GB drive over the 250GB drive, because with the higher-capacity drive more of your data will lie in the higher-performance outermost tracks of the drive.

 

Actually the 320GB tends to have higher average throughput then the 500GB because the 320GB usually only uses the fastest part of the second platter. This advantage isn't very important though because the 320GB will usually get fuller quicker and there for will get slower.

In the same way the higher capacity drive will have more data in the slower parts too.

The benchmarks I've seen confirm the single platter drive to have a lower average access time than their double platter counterpart. Drives that add a third platter pay another penalty in access times. It makes sense to me, more platters leads to more overhead.

Differences in performance will be hard/impossible to notice though. The difference in battery life could be more significant. The 500GB doesn't look too promising in the Tomshardware review. This is my main reason for preferring 250GB.

 

The 320GB drive has 2 platters but only three heads, so I'm not quite sure what the platter configuration would be.

In any case, the thing is, if you have, say, 100GB of applications and fill the rest of the drive up with multimedia, then as long as you set things up properly that 100GB will lie in the highest throughput area of the drive, and will on average have higher throughput in the larger drive.

It's not really fair to compare based on average throughput across the entire drive - if we're comparing the drives with speed as the only priority, it would be fairest to look at the performance of only the fastest 250GB of each drive. Sure, if it was a desktop, you could just buy a larger number of the smaller drives, but this isn't nearly as viable in a laptop. As such, although the slower 250GB of the 500GB drive wouldn't be so fast, it's generally still preferable to an external drive, so it's basically just an added bonus on top of the 250GB drive.

As for average access time of drives with different numbers of platters, I'd like to see some good data on that matter. Ultimately, I doubt the difference in performance, whether throughput or latency, would be particularly noticeable in any of these drives.

Overall, space, power consumption and price are the factors to make a decision on here. I'd like to see figures for the power consumption of the 250GB and 320GB versions as well.

 

I see it differently. Whether you have a 250GB, 320GB or 500GB, the primary 100GB partition will normally be on the fastest part of the first platter.

For that partition there will be no difference in throughput, whether it's on the 250GB, 320GB or 500GB.

 

I'm not so sure about that. I would think that data tends to be concentrated on the outer edges of all of the platter surfaces first, rather than just one. If you were to use only one surface at a time, that would only correspond to 125GB, and so even that 100GB partition would be well into the slow territory on that hard drive. It's possible that a hard drive could use both surfaces of only one platter at a time, but once again I consider that unlikely.

If you look at the performance degradation curves for hard drives, they will pretty much always decrease in a linear fashion from 0 to 100% fullness. If the hard drive were to use some surfaces before others, you would see a sawtooth shape - linear decrease followed by a sharp jump back upwards when you start again on the outer tracks of the new surface.

As such, for a 100GB partition, the 2-head 250GB drive would use the fastest 50GB of each surface, the 3-head 320GB drive would use the fastest 33.3GB of each surface, and the 4-head 500GB drive would use the fastest 25GB of each surface.

 

My 250GB 7200.4 had slower access times than what most people posted for the 500GB version [which amazed me], the fact the XT has nearer SSD access times for your most accessed data is what matters most and is the whole attraction along with the voluminous size and cheap price
I'll get the 500GB version personally, but I'm sure any of them will "feel" fast compared to the same ol same ol crap we've been getting for years with notebook hard drives, where they give on one hand [xfer rates] and then take away with worse access times.

I sold my tiny 64GB SSD and am looking forward to getting one of these for my new notebook to go with the 500GB HDD it will come with that can go into one of the optical bays for 1TB storage total

 

Some more single vs. dual platter:
Seagate 7200.4 250GB gets 15.8 ms here, the 500GB gets 16.9 here
Scorpio Black 160GB acces time: 14.4 ms link 14.7ms link
Scorpio Black 320GB acces time: 16.2ms link 15.9 ms link

Here two platter (above) vs. three platter (below) Toshiba:


But I agree the differences between XT 250GB and 500GB will probably be too small to notice. Can't wait to get one in my hands.

I'm not sure either. Would be interesting to know how it really is.

 

I'd say that the performance vs space curves you tend to see in HD Tune and HD Tach are strong indicators that the outer tracks on all surfaces tend to be used first. It's the most logical approach, because switching heads is less costly than seeking to a different track.

In fact, hard drives used to be addressed using CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector), where a cylinder is the span of all occurrences of the same track across multiple platter surfaces. Even though modern disks are no longer addressed in this way, because it's much easier for the Operating System to look at the disk as a bunch of logical blocks rather than having to concern itself with how the actual hardware of the drive is set up (imagine how broken CHS would be for an SSD!), it looks like that's still how things are arranged these days.

I'd like to see all of these Momentus XT drives benchmarked together, for performance and power consumption. I do agree that performance differences should be slight, but power consumption is a more interesting matter. For most people, price vs capacity is going to be the deciding factor, though.

 

Mine was 17.6ms, so was evoss's, thats compared to 16.2 for both my 7k320's 320GB....maybe our 7200.4 250GB were dud's, but no one else seemed to have the 250GB versions in the 7200.4 thread

 

What do you guys think of the review done by The Tech report: Seagate's Momentus XT hard drive - The Tech Report - Page 1
Their conclusion is totally different than other reviews: "While the Momentus XT offers good sequential write performance, sequential reads prove more problematic. The rapid drop in read speeds we observed in HD Tune isn't encouraging, and neither is the drive's poor read performance in FC-Test. Throw in a complete lack of performance scaling in IOMeter between 1 and 32 concurrent IO requests, and the XT looks to have just as many problems as it has potential.".

I just preordered one and now I'm not sure if it was a wise decision

 

I just read it, my take: In the majority of benchmarks the Momentus XT outperforms the other 7200rpm hard drives. So for normal work it's just a regular fast hard drive.

What the Techreport benchmarks fail to show is the amazing boot and application launching times that Cnet, Anandtech and Laptopmag showed. Reason for this is the way they set up their benchmarks.

I wouldn't worry about HDTune results because they have very little to do with normal performance.

Maybe Techreport got a faulty drive because other's HDTune results look a bit better:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/first_look

I agree with the Techreport conclusion though:

 

Yep, my take as well. I have one on pre-order. For everyone else; please buy the SSD drives and bring the prices down

 

Thanks you guys, now I can sleep well
I hope my XT will arrive soon, nothing beats real life experience!

 

Judging by all the reviews I think this summarizes the XT performance: it performs like a fast 7200rpm HDD + it boots the OS and a couple of applications at near SSD speed.

If you're not expecting more you won't be disappointed I guess.

I'm waiting for the Laptopmag full review to come online. It's usually a high quality review with a lot of real life benchmarks and battery life measurements.

 

Tom's Hardware updated their review with real life benchmarks:



Benchmark Results: Windows And Application Startup Time : Momentus XT Review: Seagate's Marriage Of The HDD And Flash Memory

Edit: new deal $118 final for 500GB
$129.99
+$4.17 shipping
- $15.60 BING CB
= $118.56 Final
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/1007671/

 

I think it's well determined that performance is very good.

Now I'm curious about the heat, noise, and power drain of this HDD.

 

Going by all the reviews heat and noise will not be a problem. But battery life may be. Tom's hardware review did one synthetic battery life test that didn't turn out to well.

On the good side, Techreport found idle comsumption to be extremely low. Lower than some common SSDs.