Anybody vouch for the Momentus Hybrid HDD/SSD?

Has anybody opted for the Seagate Momentus drive?

I was looking at ordering my P150HM with the Momentus Hybrid as the main HDD plus the empty optical drive caddy. Then putting my Corsair Force 3 GT 120gb in the laptop as the main drive and the 500 as storage in the optical.

Has anybody else set it up this way, or have any opinions on the Hybrid drives offered by Seagate?

 

the momentus hybrid works great, but I feel its unnecessary/overkill for a storage drive. Why not just use a regular 7200rpm drive?

 

I had my laptop set up like that for a while. The drive worked great and I had no complaints. In the end 500GB just wasn't enough for me though.

That said the performance boost wasn't worth the price premium to me. You can pretty easily pick up a 750GB 7200rpm WD Scorpio Black or a 1TB 5400rpm drive for less.

 

A momentus is totally uneccessary for a storage drive. Use the money saved for a large 720GB or 1TB 7200RPM storage drive.

 

Hmmm... I figured that might be the case. Not the biggest fan of the 1TB 2.5" drives. Will probably go with the 750GB black in the ODD.

 

Do they have reliable 1TB 7200rpm drives out?

 

i recently bought an wd scorpion black 750gb as a primary hard drive!!!!this drive is really fast.fast boot times,fast response.definitely recommend.

 

nope. Most of the available 2.5" 1TB drives that are available on the market right now are specced at 5400 rpm. If you want the performance of a desktop drives, go for 750 GB.

also, check out this link:

Top Notebook Drive Battle: Seagate versus Western Digital at 750GB - Bright Side Of News*

as johnnyman27 said, it seems that wd scorpion black 750gb is quite good.

 

I have the drive it is nice, faster boot into Windows and that is where I see the advantage stopping. I have to agree with the rest of the posters opinions

 

I have the drive also, windows boots super fast and games my games that is stored on the hard drive also loads fast. I'm glad I bought this as, SSD was not an option (too pricey for the amount of space you get).

 

That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that. Trying to decide on this one myself.

 

If you can afford the hybrid drive with the notebook, it'll give you a decent speed boost over a straight mechanical drive. You can always upgrade to a decent SSD down the road if/when they become cheaper. It's a pretty quick do it yourself upgrade anyway, and you can still keep your hybrid drive in the optical bay as a second drive if you wanted (granted without the speed benefits of such)

 

As Mal #2 and several others have said, if you intend to use it with a SSD, then you lose the advantage. It only really gives you a boost as a boot drive. Buy a Black to use as your data drive. Very fast.

 

I am pretty much doing exactly this. But instead I went ahead and got the 750gb 7200rpm option. In a month or so as I test out the new p150hm (and I assume I will love it) I will invest in a fast SSD and move the 750 to the optical bay as storage. That is the smartest option in my opinion, for the same reasons as mentioned by others. Using the hybrid drive as storage hinders its potential. Go with the 750 at 7200gb. Still a relatively fast option and when you go to the SSD, you'll have 250gb more storage then you would get with Momentus XT

Btw. I'm getting ready to peruse some more...but can you select to boot from the hard drive in the optical bay by pressing a key (f12 for dell and others) during the bios boot up? I'm curious because that might be advantage for me instead of having to partition my main hard drive more than I need to. Sorry to hijack your thread friend!

 

F7 at boot will give you a boot options screen. You can choose which drive to boot from there. You can also set the boot order through bios as well

 

To quantify this drive's performance with reference to the other options on the market, I'd suggest taking a look at this review:

AnandTech - Seagate's Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD

Although it isn't as fast as an SSD, it is decently faster than a HDD while being drastically cheaper than your average SSD.

 

Black is a great hard disc, I use it with a caddy combined with a 128 GB kingston ssd.

 

Personally I think they are rubbish, you may get a little boot time out of it but thats about it

If you want an SSD get an SSD otherwise get a WD Black

 

I've used Momentus XT's in six builds so far. I've had one fail on me. It's actually the only drive I have ever had fail on me. I currently use a 500Gb as my storage drive in my Sager. It was a leftover drive from a old HTPC build that was upgraded to a SSD.

There is definitely a noticeable speed boost over a 7200RPM mechanical drive, but as mentioned if the cost is significantly more, it isn't worth it as a storage/secondary drive. Just don't go with a 5400RPM drive.

 

I am using the 500GB XT’s in three of my laptops and 2 of my HTPC's. They help speed up boot times, file access, resuming from sleep mode, etc. The more often you run the same program, the faster it gets. Game load times are also decreased. Here is one for all the naysayers to ponder... I have a third HTPC (my primary HTPC in my Theater Room) that uses an OCZ Agility 3 as it's OS drive. The hardware is identical (i7-2600k cpu's, Asus P8Z68 Deluxe MB’s, 8GB’s ram, etc) as one of the HTPC's with a XT as its OS drive. Guess what? Boot times differ by approximately 5 seconds or so... Compared with the boot times of some of my other systems which take three times as long, that's a pretty good performance bump if you ask me.

The $500 GB Momentus XT sells for as low as $75 when on sale. IMHO, well worth the $20-$25 price premium over what you would pay for a cheaper 7200 rpm drive. For those who say the WD Black is faster, Google will provide you with lots of different comparisons and benchmarks that say you are wrong. All in all, if you are not going with a SSD, the XT is a great investment. Hope this helps.

 

Hey king. Any issues with the vertex?

Mr. Mysterious

 

None. However, I have read of so many others having issues. I updated it with the latest firmware when I got it (and keep it updated) and this maybe why I have been problem free. I have another in my gaming rig as well and it has also been issue free. The firmware updates seem to have fixed the problems and I have my fingers crossed that I won't run into any problems down the line.

 

If you dont want to spend the amount for a full SSD drive the Hybrid drives are a great alternative.
I had a 500gb 7200rpm drive in my notebook for about a year until i upgraded to the hybrid. When i get to work i start the same 7 programs every day so i got very used to the amount of time it would take all those programs to start. When i got the Hybrid in there program start time was about cut down in half, as well as Windows booting up quicker. I have a Vertex 3 on my desktop and that is noticeably faster then the Hybrid but the Hybrid is noticeably faster then the standard HDD i had in there there before. If you can afford the Hybrid get it over the HDD, if you can get an SSD thats the best option to go with.

They Hybrid drive will only benefit you as the main drive, if you put it on the second drive bay and are using it just for storage it wont help.

 

A quick clarification on some of the posts in this thread...

If you have files which remain static - application exes/dlls, development libraries (sdks, libs, headers), music, images, or just plain source data file all of which are read over and over again, there will be a performance increase in disk I/O as those files will end up on the SSD portion on the Momentus XT.

This is the case regardless if the XT is a system drive or a secondary drive. What it boils down to is what is stored on the drive, and what is happening to the files stored on the drive.

 

Here is a good writeup on a 2 drive RAID 0 Momentus XT. Speed on the Cheap: Seagate Momentus XT RAID | TechwareLabs
Very good performance in comparison to a full SSD. With the benenfit of Space and Price. A single XT just doesn't cut it by itself. but 2 in a stripe screams for the $/GB.

 

Here is another good blog on Raid 0 of 2 drive
Seagate momentus XT