Seagate Momentus XT vs SATA3 SSD

Hi,

I currently have an Acer 4830T laptop, 2.1Ghz Core i3, 6GB RAM etc... thing really flies (I'm ultra careful how I maintain the OS etc, optimize everything ).

However, I'm in a bit of dilemma. I currently have 2x 1TB Samsung M8's (scoring 5.9 performance), which are supposedly very fast for 5400 drives (similar performance to 7200 drives) due to their advanced format and 500GB platters.

However, I would like to further enhance the speed of the machine, so am looking at a 120GB Mushkin Chronos or OCZ Vertex III. Both of these are SF22xx drives 500+/450+ MB/s and 100,000+ IOPS, so top performance. Now obviously I have 2 1TB drives, because I'm a storage freak, and were it not for Samsung releasing these drives last year (9.5mm 1TB) when they did (July), I was about to go for a 500GB Momentus XT primary drive and 750GB secondary drive.

But what I want to know, in general everyday tasks, are the Momentus XT's actually noticebly faster than regular spinners, and do they compare to SSD's at all?

I know there is reviews and videos on the net, that suggest they are the best spinners since bread came sliced, but they are all testing new, clean and unhammered drives, which as we all know, a machine can run wonderful whilst its new and clean, but it's a few months later than the speed starts to lag, even on the best kept systems.

I'm thinking for the same price as the SSD's, I could go for a Momentus XT 750GB and that way I'm only losing 250GB of space, but it's only worth doing that, if the speed improvement is good, and consistent. Battery life isnt too important, the lappy gets about 7 - 8 hours even with both spinners running, so I can afford to lose a little if the XT consumes more power.

Types of stuff I do, is web browsing (anywhere from 10 - 150 tabs open at once, IE, Chrome and Opera usually), watching HD videos (but that would come off the remaining M8 anyway), playing music in Winamp 2.91 lol, microsoft office 2003, outlook, Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, Bittorrent, run ESET Smart Security in the background (and nothing much else except Intel graphics and Dolby Sound manager) so nothing hugely demanding, just want to improve the load times of apps etc...

Cheers

 

Go to the XT 8GB nand thread, theres a guy in there who knows a lot of the XT2 and has compared it to SSD and says the SSD isnt much faster and not worth the extra money.

Also heres a video comparing 7200 to XT to intel ssd. The SSD isnt much faster than XT.

Momentus XT 750GB & the Dell 15Z - YouTube

 

You see that video is nice, similar to a few I've seen... but they are all under lab conditions, and in that instance, the Intel 320 is not even close to a Chronos or Vertex III for performance.

I'm more interested in how fast the discs are 3 and 6 months down the line, and how they perform against the latest generation of SF SATA3 varients.

It's like saying a Mercedes A class CDI is certified to achieve a peak of 80mpg, yet nobody can get anywhere near that, because they only got 80mpg under lab conditions, in the real world it's very different, especially as the engine gets more and more worn out.

 

For what it's worth, I just posted in a thread where the average boot times were listed as ~76 seconds whereas my hp pavilion came in at ~30 seconds using the momentus 500GB. As for day-to-day operations, it's pretty fast IMHO. No problems watching BluRay movies (I don't do much gaming.)

I should point out that I just installed 2 Intel 520's (RAID0) in my desktop and am considering dropping one in my laptop as the OS. Just waiting to check the performance of the desktop.

 

My boot times were about the same as yours when I had the Momentus xt 500gb, now with the patriot pyro I boot in 18seconds according to the Lenovo boot optimizer. In my experience the XT is faster than a standard 7200rpm drive but the SSD is still noticeably faster in day to day usage. When I open any application it's open pretty much immediately. An example is word/ecel, with the XT when you open it you see the scroll bar for what it is loading, with the Pyro you don't see that it just opens.

The biggest benefit I see though is my laptop is almost totally silent and that to me is worth the money. If I'm sitting at the laptop browsing and emailing for a couple of hours the fan may come on once, with the XT I could hear the hum from it and the fan would come on more often, for me, this justifies the extra money.

Performance wise, I'd put the XT right in the middle of a 7200 and a SSD. It's a vary capable drive that most people would love to own, only you can decide if it's worth the extra money and smaller storage though.

 

@ MattLFC

The performance of a Momentus XT2 is very close to that of a SSD for booting Windows and applications however consistency as you've mentioned will not be the same as a SSD as the Momentus XT2 is still mechanical drive and will get fragmented overtime.

You'll still need to defrag but far less often then a regular mechanical drive and once the drive (Momentus XT2) has been defragmented you'll have to build the cache for booting Windows and application again (faster than first gen Momentus XT for building cache).

In your case I'd go with the Momentus XT2 simply because of the hard drive space and price/performance ratio of getting a larger SSD drive (way too expensive).

For regular optimization of a Momentus XT2, I'd treat it like a SSD using a SSD optimizer daily/weekly (which does not clear the cache) and fully fragmenting every month or couple moths (does clear the cache and rebuilding of cache is needed).

 

Cheers for the responses dudes, gives me something to think about. Maximum SSD I'd be looking at is around 120GB, but for similar pricing I can get a 750GB Momentus XT, so quite a difference.

I guess I'll just have to see how it goes; I was going to wait for 500GB SSD's to drop in price, but I can't see that happening for a long time, and tbh, I think an SSD should really be used primarily for the boot drive and apps, and not much else, given their limited life-cycle.

I don't think I ever defragged a drive since Windows Vista, and hardly ever since Windows 2000, never really experience much slow down (most people see my PC's and are absolutely gob smacked by the performance of them, I have a Pentium III 1.4 512K Tualatin machine running XP SP3 and ESET, and is extremely fast and smooth (until it runs out of it's 512MB RAM ceiling), indeed most people ask how it is do fast compared to their new PC's (it's highly optimized lol).

I always turn off IO wasting services I don't ever use (or benefit from reguarly enough) such as Windows Restore and Indexing (Windows Search in 7), so I do try and keep IO load as low as possible, also have all the Aero and fancy effects crap turned off lol.

I just like things to open instantly (and won't adopt new software [for fear of bloatware] except for security reasons and/or important features), and to be honest, most of my apps do, it's just the more intensive ones like Photoshop that are telling on my spinners.

At this point, I may just give the XT a chance, if I get the 750 it has 8GB solid state, so it could suit my needs better, as you lot point out.

Thanks for the feedback once again, it is greatly appreciated.