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    Seagate Momentus XT vs Samsung Spinpoint 1tb

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Rhood168, Mar 5, 2012.

  1. Rhood168

    Rhood168 Notebook Enthusiast

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    If you already have a ssd as your primary, what would be a better option for a secondary hhd? :eek:
     
    Rhood168, Mar 5, 2012
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  2. Tsunade_Hime

    Tsunade_Hime such bacon. wow

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    The MomentusXT is useless as a secondary drive. Plus it's $$$ for a 500 GB drive and isn't that fast of a drive in terms of read/write speeds. If you need storage for cheap, get the Samsung (or in reality, Seagate).
     
    Tsunade_Hime, Mar 5, 2012
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  3. jclausius

    jclausius Notebook Virtuoso

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    Depends on what you will put on the drive, and how you will use it. Also, depends on if you need 1TB or can get by w/ 750GB of drive space.

    The XT has some great uses when used in tandem w/ an SSD, but you need to know if you will be using it in a way to take advantage of the NAND Cache (for example as a spot for your user's directory, or for often used libraries). See http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/649060-ssd-vs-hybrid-4.html#post8358305 for a post I answered earlier this morning for other uses.
     
    jclausius, Mar 5, 2012
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  4. Rhood168

    Rhood168 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Wow repped, Thanks ill prob go with the XT as the secondary drives and since i have that option maybe buy a 3rd drive and throw it in but if what im reading is true about the drive still benefiting even though its 2nd then it just seems like the better option.
     
    Rhood168, Mar 5, 2012
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  5. jclausius

    jclausius Notebook Virtuoso

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    NP. It will really depend on what you store on it, and how that data is used (read - over and over again). In terms of price, the 750GB/8GB SSD Momentus XT is priced just a tad under a 750GB Scorpio black.

    Also, one other thing to mention... Seagate is supposedly working on a firmware update so the 2nd Gen XT drive would allow WRITEs to the SSD portion. Again this is for that drive only. Dunno how that ties into performance, but if this *is* true, it will be interesting to see what Seagate does in that area.
     
    jclausius, Mar 5, 2012
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  6. DC87

    DC87 Notebook Consultant

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    For the average user I would say the 1TB drive is better... Like if the secondary data is just holding data such as movies do you really need it cached in the NAND? I would get the 1TB drive if it is cheaper then the XT.
     
    DC87, Mar 5, 2012
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  7. NotEnoughMinerals

    NotEnoughMinerals Notebook Deity

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    The XT can still be very useful as a secondary drive. If you don't have the space on your SSD for games, your XT will see what games you've played often and recently that are on your hybrid and start to cache them and ta da, after a couple loads that game that you've been playing loads as if it were on an SSD!
     
    NotEnoughMinerals, Mar 5, 2012
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  8. Generic User #2

    Generic User #2 Notebook Deity

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    are there benchmarks for loading games?

    since games are huge and files are loaded in distinct stages, it would seem that the game's 'boot' files would have been removed from cache immediately after loading.
     
    Generic User #2, Mar 5, 2012
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  9. jclausius

    jclausius Notebook Virtuoso

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    They may exist, but I personally haven't seen any for gaming. I mostly see things like boot-up, and other app tests such as photoshop load times, opening large excel spread sheets, etc.

    I think that if you start a game enough times (say 5 or 6 times), probably enough of the startup sequence would make it to the cache.

    FWIW, the XT uses what Seagate calls "Adaptive Memory Technology", so what is found in the SSD isn't like a normal disk cache (of which the XT also has 32MB), but it is rather an SSD copy of the blocks from the most often read disk LBAs. They are not invalidated when the disk reads more than 8GB of data, but rather kept around as long as the SSD is instructed to cache (or it is deleted). And when invalidated, the least often used data is what is removed from the SSD portion.
     
    jclausius, Mar 5, 2012
    #9