hey should i get this ?!

Hey guys i was on amazon i saw this hard drive for sale on
Amazon.com: Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32 MB Cache 2.5 Inch Solid State Hybrid Drive ST95005620AS-Bare Drive: Electronics
and if i order the 500GB i get a Free CMS Data Transfer Kit although i dont know what the hell is that >..<" was wondering is it good for it's price or no ? XD
i know it's a good hard drive since i read alot about it ;p
or should i just wait since i dont have much time i havent been using my m11x lately since i dont have much time ;p

 

Are you looking for a speed increase, more storage, faster boot times, etc?

 

The price/performance value of this particular drive is tremendous, but I would only recommend such an upgrade if you're going to use it, especially since you're already moving from a 7200RPM drive. New upgrades are fun and exciting, but you don't want to see it fall into disuse.

 

The data transfer kits are normally an external USB enclosure that you put your old drive into so you can copy everything over. They sometimes include software to make sure that partitions are aligned (more important on a 100% SSD as opposed to a hybrid drive).

shopper.com lists it from $119.99 - $160.00, so yes, $99.99 is a good price.

As others have mentioned, if you already have a 7200RPM drive it may not be worth it to you - depends on what you do with your PC.

Another thing I would suggest (if you're running Windows 7 and have an internal SD reader in your notebook) is to look at a fast 4GB to 32GB SD card. The Seagate drive has 4GB of flash memory and it relies on "learning" what data Windows requests frequently and copying that data to its flash area. An equally-sized SD card can be managed by Windows 7's ReadyBoost, where Windows itself decides what to keep on the flash card. And of course, larger SD cards are available (be sure to re-format the flash card with NTFS so ReadyBoost isn't limited to the 2GB FAT32 limit). I'm using 32GB SD cards on my Windows 7 systems that don't have SSD's.

 

Readyboost doesn't show much performance difference once you have enough RAM. The issue at hand is that it is bound to be slower than HDD and is only good for short random page read. Adding more RAM as general file cache would benefit more.

The advantage of Readyboost as I see it is, it reduce access to the HDD and make it cooler.

 

Although the average ReadyBoost media has a slower transfer rate than the HDD, it has a zero seek time (just like a SSD). The limiting factor on things like boot speed is disk seek time (assuming reasonable amounts of memory).

I'm told that the Vista ReadyBoost was quite poor. 7's seems a lot better, and I am seeing benefits here w/ a 32GB flash card even though my system disk is a 300GB Velociraptor.

Just like a hybrid HDD/SSD, ReadyBoost will take time to "learn" what things should be cached. The advantage of ReadyBoost is that Windows is doing it, as opposed to a hybrid drive passively watching requests and guessing from that.

 

I think Newegg had it for like 79.99 last November...

The MomentusXT 500 GB in all honesty was a big letdown for me. I upgraded my now gone E6410 from a 160 GB Hitachi 5400 RPM drive to the 500 GB MomentusXT, and I didn't notice a significant performance boost in all honesty..

 

ReadyBoost is irrelevant these days.

ReadyBoost assumes that:
1) You are in a situation where you run out of physical RAM, and must use a pagefile.
2) Your use of the pagefile uses random read patterns more than sequential read patterns.
3) You have a USB flash drive that is faster than your HDD (mechanical) in random read speeds. A USB 2.0 flash drive gets killed by even the slowest mechanical HDD in sequential reads, and gets killed by an SSD in any kind of read/write pattern.
4) You are willing to buy (or already have) a USB flash drive or SD card to use with ReadyBoost.
5) You are willing to accept the hit to battery life by using ReadyBoost.

Only when all of those situations are satisfied does ReadyBoost show any performance benefits.

But ReadyBoost is irrelevant these days. RAM is so cheap and plentiful that nobody needs to page to disk. Even budget consumer-level laptops come with 4GB of RAM, which is more than enough RAM for 98% of people out there. The other 2% of people who need >4GB of RAM know who they are, and will go out and buy an 8GB RAM kit for $50 so that they never page to disk. All you get with ReadyBoost these days is decreased battery life.

 

@kent1146

not my experience about battery life. Readyboost doesn't give me performance gain but does reduce my HDD access frequency which reduce my overall system temperature. And temperature is positive correlated with power use.

 

Wasn't there a thread that established if your going to use readyboost, the fastest option tends to be a high speed SD card?
Just throwing that out there, media card readers are often mPCI-E and not USB.

 

ya thats why am looking at and damn it got cheeper it was 120 dollars yesterday XD
hmmm very Tempting :3