Seagate Momentus XT vs SSD

Guys. Has anybody tried this hybrid SSD/HDD Harddrive? Any pros and cons for gaming?

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

I am planning to get this instead of SSD's because simply of the cost.

Thanks.

 

Even if you have an SSD and were considering a second to replace your hard drive this definitely sounds like an option, thanks for the post.

 

The Seagate Momentus XL Review: HDD-SSD Hybrid | Spot Cool Stuff: Tech

According to that website, launch times do lower with time. But overall I woudnt expect a major increase in all around performance, since it'll probably only affect your most played game.

 

The preliminary reviews were great and alot of people jumped on these. However further testing and benchmarking found less than desirable results. Try googling reviews that are after the release date and you'll see for yourselves. I might however pick something like this up for my secondary drive to replace the seagate 500gb however it probably won't be till the next gen.

 

To me it's just not good.

Just look at the benchmark from the review:

GTA IV Launch Times:

SSD: 40 seconds

Momentus XT:
- Trial 1: 120 seconds
- Trial 2: 90 seconds
- Trial 3: 80 seconds

It will just never go to 40 seconds...

Yes SSD are more expensive but as a main drive it is just a must these days. I could never go back to an HDD myself.

 

They're never designed nor intended to replace or even duplicate a SDD's results. they're $130 a pop.. and you get 10+ times the space of a SDD at the same price. You get a 500GB 7200RPM drive and a 4GB Nand buffer that can speed up the stuff you do most more quickly. I mean, 32GB SSD's are in that price point, and I load almost 4-500GB of data on my M17X, so for me.. it's an absolute necessary to have 1TB of storage. I'm not sure anyone that buys these things are confusing them to even remotely resemble the speed of a SDD. Another generation or two when we get more NAND it might work better, but for now it's mostly just about the small increase and big size for $40-50 more than a regular conventional. I think once people start using these in RAID, and have 8GB of NAND accessible they will work a lot better.

 

I guess I see your point but nonetheless we just need to pressure manufacturers to make SSD a much cheaper product.

If a 500G SSD was worth $600 or $700, not many people would consider HHD.

Again I am talking about the gaming world...

 

Not many people are willing to drop $600 on a 500GB SSD, not even in the "gaming world".

Granted, since that would mean smaller SSDs would also be cheaper, a lot of people would buy the, say, $150 125GB drive.

 

I bought a $4400 laptop and I still consider $6-700 for 500GB of storage a colossal waste of money. 500GB drives are only made in 3.5" size and are ~ $1400-1500 still, so i'm thinking it will be a few years before that happens, and by then, 500GB won't be so big. I'm also sure, nowhere close to most of the gaming world use or will consider a SSD in the future as being a necessary component in their computer. I'm sure they'll rather spend that on a new GPU processor ram or a few games before saying' hey! I need 10second faster load times in X game '

I agree, SSD's are by far still a niche market, even in the niche market of 'gamers'. Unfortunately, at the rate we're progressing, unless a major NAND flash breakthrough is made that allows extremely cheap manufacturing costs, by the time 125GB drives are $150, they'll be about as usefull as a 32GB $120 drive is today. MHDD's are not going anywhere anytime soon. Hybrid drives are a good medium with minimal increases in costs and no downsides.

 

Excellent analysis. Unfortunately, too many people in this thread and some other similar ones are just blabbering nonsense about how these drives are slower than SSDs, without realizing that we are talking about a product with entirely different parameters. Like you said, if I happen to need dual-500GB drives to accommodate my requirements, I don't even need to think about SSDs. Of course, if a couple dozen gigs is fine for me, then the story is different.

 

conclusion is quite obvious .. SSD>> XT..

 

What most people miss is that SSD's are not the only performance game in town anymore. With this marriage of the Hybrid drive SSD's have to start coming down in price to be competative. Before if you wanted real high performance you had to pay the huge premiums, now you don't.

I have noticed SSD's seem to be going on sale more and more and getting cheaper already. I think you will start seeing drastic reductions soon, especially if hybrid competition starts between the major HDD manufacturers.

If the innards of say a 32GB X25-e and the new 750GB 7200 RPM were married for say $400-$450 street. In mass production this would be entirely possible.

I'll be the first to say a decent SSD is greater in raw performance than the XT in some ways. Now if you have to work on huge amounts of data and have to use an external USB solution that speedy SSD will be cripled by the slow external drive and the portability of having to tether to that storage solution. Even a dual drive laptop with a primary SSD may benefit from having the XT as a storage/work space solution.

On single drive machines even frequent archiving and bringing work over to the computer could easily cancel the SSD's advantage or even hinder it overall compared to the XT. So I'll say it again SSD's are not the only high performance game in town anymore..............

 

Except for cost, then XT >> SSD. Everything has its pros and cons.

 

I am mostly used to sata drives myself and i just can't justify spending 600 bucks on a drive i am sorry nope, i have a ssd 60 gig one for my m11x and i am going to upgrade it eventually to a OCZ 120 drive but when its cheaper it was on sale but just not ready for it. I am going to purchase this drive eventually and i don't mind have some faster speed, think about it its like the samsung ssds for Dell and just much larger storage. Its now going to force these people to lower the price of a 256 ssd to a 100 bucks or so from 600 but still just too much money sure 300 read and write speed is awesome but when you can't afford it what are you going to do? Plus my samsung ssd failed on me last week too!! Good thing i didn't really have much on there anyway. So ssds still have a long way to go, its nothing compared too 30 years of regular hard drives. But always good to have a 60 gig boot drive though.

 

1.) since There is no Trim right now with Raid these will have an advantage there as well.
2.) OS independent so trim support or GC is of no real worry, other than Windows 7 users can rejoice.
3.) SSD failure rates seem high (disadvantage of new tech). If the SSD section fails here the HDD should still hold the data.
4.) Acceptable costs to actually start seeing them in off the shelf systems.
5.) Data recoverable as in any HDD, few to no "Dead and Gone".
6.) IDE or ACHI so long as the interface is SATA.
7.) A real primary HDD section, Prefetch, superfetch, pagefile, hybernation file amongst other tweaks or function loss not required for longevity.

I am not so sure about the alignment issues as maybe that relates itself to HDD's as well. Someone more qualified would have to answer that.

I am sure this can be added too. The point is as mentioned, pro's and cons to both.............

 

I would love to see SSDs coming down in price. Buying an XT to demonstrate that SSDs are overpriced is how I plan on voting.

 

Where have you seen reports of SSD failures as compared to HDD failures?

 

I am generally going by user posts on various sites. While there is no realstatistic you can bet the majority who fork out the big bucks are the ones that post here and reviews of the hardwaer on the purchasing sites. Since these are so high in cost there is no way they outsell traditional HD's in volume but there seems to be as many or more coming back with issues. This to me indicates a good probability of higher failure rates than tradiitonal HDD's.

Do SSD manufacturers put a number out, yeah right! Trust me that if the SSD's were as or more reliable than the platter offerings you would see it in ads all over the place. So the manufacturers silence is deafening as well.

There most likely will come a day where SSD's are as or even more reliable than platters, but today isn't that day. On that note am I woried about the SSD section of the XT, somewhat. It however is SLC and thereby may be more dependable.............

 

Well, some of the SSD have a measly 3 year warranty. With a large capacity SSD you are dropping $300 to 400 a year, total / 3. Who wants to buy my 3 year old SSD?

I'll stick to hybrid drives w/5 year warranty. If the XT sells well enough; this may be the incentive for more advanced SLC hybrids.

If I win the lottery, disregard this post..

 

I agree, 3 years for a $400 drive sucks, however, do you really expect to have the same storage requirements 3 years from now? Imo, most of the people that buy these things are

 

Too true SSD's certainly are not reliable at all. Unless you get the ultimate high end most expensive products. I bought a SSD 2 years ago and it had a 2 year warranty I am presently undergoing my third and final RMA in order to get a 4th new drive. No more SSD's for me for several years at least!!

 

For me, the issue isn't reliability, it's cost. These drives (SSDs) are not for people who have storage needs. They are for people who have secondary file storage systems other than their laptops. As a person with a limited desktop setup, this could not be a primary drive for me. It could serve as a boot drive, but I would need secondary storage in whatever laptop I buy.

Currently, I'm interested in a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 as a boot drive in a macbook pro.

 

Quite a few slightly used SSD drives on NBR Marketplace; a few in the 120GB size.