Conclusion
There are two ways of looking at Seagate’s new Momentus XT. If you know that the drive pairs rotating storage with 4GB of SLC NAND flash memory, then you probably expect a lot from this new product. I have to admit that this happened to us. However, looking at the product name first allows us to take the position and standpoint that is most appropriate when looking at this product: the Momentus XT is a hard drive! It just happens to utilize flash memory in an effort to improve performance. Once we treat it like a hard drive, then we shed the performance expectations to which it can't live up.
All performance numbers we’ve seen are at least good, as the Momentus XT outperforms all 7,200 RPM 500GB competitors in the majority of our benchmarks. It is the fastest 2.5” drive when it comes to throughput and I/Os, it has good application performance and it delivers great scores on SYSmark 2007 as well, which is based on real applications. There are a few benchmarks in which the drive shows a few small glitches, which may be the price we pay for Adaptive Memory trying to optimize. We also have to mention that power consumption of this drive is slightly higher than other drives on average, which results in shorter battery runtime on notebooks.
At this point, we realize that reaching a verdict is not so easy. The new memory management technology is complex and hard to benchmark, as optimizations take place in the background, because we don’t know the performance parameters of the flash memory. It is obvious that there is more potential than the benchmark numbers reveal: some results are just too good for a conventional hard drive and other numbers will probably improve by just repeating the workload and have the drive optimize its data management.
Many of the test results should therefore be seen as worst-case results, as the numbers can only get better over time. In the end, we don’t see real disadvantages for the Momentus XT, except the somewhat-higher power requirements compared to competiting 500GB drives. However, the drive aims at the segment of enthusiast and workstation laptops, and it delivers excellent performance for a hard drive. It would be great if new firmware versions would actually enable the promised 80% performance increase in PCMark and other benchmarks. We’ve tasted blood with the Momentus XT.
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Well that was a bit of an anti-climax.
So they managed to repeat the failures of the last attempt at hybrid drives then?
Anti-climax does not even begin to cover the disappointment.
I had high hopes for longer battery life, but without improvements
there is no scenario I can think of where this drive has any advantage.
Combien?
At Anand they reran every benchmark until the background optimization was done. At that point, it significantly outperformed any other 2,5" HDD. Its performance was just about exactly halfway between a HDD and a true SSD, which is quite good...
What's the price of these things anyway? If they're not much more expensive they might be worth it if you're in the market for a new drive. I wouldn't replace a perfectly good drive with one of these. The performance increase is way too small for that.
Isn't the point of this drive that the most used applications will make more use of the SSD, to 'learn' the user? And that can't really be tested effectively.
I just wish they were doing an IDE flavoured set of these drives (or just the 500gb one).... My laptop is rather long in the tooth but still does everything I want it to do so have no plans on replacing it. However storage space is always an issue and the speed bump would be a great boost.
Yes it would be handy if they gave some extra battery life, but really thats not an issue for me as my battery is dead, and it lives off the mains anyway.
This is stupid. None of these test real world performance of often used programs, which is what the drive is good at. Look at any other sites who actually test the drive correctly. From Boot to Windows, opening web browser, office, and other commonly used files. You will see the performance is well worth the slightly higher price.
How about boot performance after a couple boots?
As others have said, according to benchmarks at other sites this drive is much faster for booting and application loading, much more like an SSD and having a good amount of storage. Maybe it isn't quite worth the 90 quid it came up on google shopping as, but it's still a nice improvement in some areas once it's gotten used to doing it.
How can you review this drive if you don't even understand how it works!! The anandtech.com site was much more informative. The drive is no SSD but neither is it a turkey like this review implies.
The 4Gb SLC NAND flash storage area is used as a read cache which mirrors frequently accessed data from the rotating harddisk media. Therefore you must _rerun_ benchmarks to see the access time improvements (the initial runs/accesses will be at the speed of the conventional harddisk).