Momentus XT Hybrid 500Gb RAID-0, good idea?

Hi to all Sager/Clevo users) My NP9170 should come to my hands in a bit with single Momentus XT Hybrid 500Gb HDD. I thought i would add a 2nd HDD to RAID-0 them, but came across this thread - Momentus XT APM spindown feature causes "lag spike... - Seagate Community Forums

It says these drives has lags in games and in normal use sometimes. Did anybody try to install those HDD's as RAID-0?

Thank you

 

I wouldn't recommend it, both because the hybrid part will never get used properly and yea they like to power down. You would get more performance from a pair of normal hdd's than a pair of hybrids.

 

Alright, and what if i just install 2 of them, not in RAID? Will i face any problems then? tnx

 

Hmm interesting. I've run my two specimens in RAID 0 with SRT caching on top with none of the problems described. They do have firmwares of a much later revision than the ones mentioned in the linked thread though.

The performance was as expected and I had no spin-down issues (unlike the WD Scorpio Blue drive I tried, which was unusable for me)

If you've got an evening to spare and already have the drives, why not give it a go and see if it works for you.

 

I've got the Momentus XT as my data drive and I have to agree that Raid 0 isn't the best idea. ._. Can't imagine how it'd work at all. >.o

 

I'm sorry, but that's not true at all.

When I was benchmarking Windows 7 boot times in various configs, one XT would boot my system in 21.5 seconds, RAID 0 in 18.4 seconds. A typical non-hybrid setup is twice that.

The cache definitely does it's thing, also in RAID 0 mode. And why wouldn't it? It's managed by the drive and completely OS independant.

(Interestingly, if you put SRT on top of either setup, the Windows boot time is exactly the same - 13.4 seconds in my case - in both RAID 0 and non-RAID. Which is to be expected - the OS is booting completely off the SSD)

 

hm.. csoren you think i just have to sownload the latest firmware for the hybrids and i'm good to go? i'll give it a shot next week when my system arrives. Really need that 1Tb of storage right now, may be will upgrade to 2x256Gb SSD RAID-0 next year

imglidinhere i thought the same way first...

 

That's because the Momentus has a static reserved cache specially designed for Windows startup as part of its SSD space.

On everyday usage, though, it caches dynamically based on a certain 'learning mechanism'. RAIDing 2 of those puppies will mess up their learning mechanisms and prevent them from caching to the best of their ability.

Plus, yeah - they do tend to spin down a lot, that's why they're so good as data drives, but I really wouldn't want to use them as main drives.

 

Source, please? This is not something I have seen mentioned in any of Seagate's material. Quite the contrary in fact - they highlight how cross platform the technology is. So yeah, that's not how it works at all.

 

Just google it. After 30 seconds of searches I found that:

hard drive - Is Seagate's new "FAST Factor Boot" technology compatible with Ubuntu? - Ask Ubuntu

Seagate Momentus XT (750GB) Reviewed | Storage Drives Reviewed (...but the XT's unique firmware uses it to cache frequently accessed file. Because start times are so important, the XT uses an undisclosed portion of that 8GB just to cache Windows boot files).

The list goes on and on and on. Just look it up.