Legit Reviews

Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

Seagate today announced the Momentus XT drive that combines SSD-like performance with the massive capacity and much lower cost of HDDs. The Momentus XT drive also features Adaptive Memory that learns and optimizes the drive’s performance to each user by moving frequently used information into the flash memory for faster access. Read on to see how this drive performs when we put it to the test!

The Seagate Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive is a very interesting product. If you run your standard hard drive tests on it, it will more than likely not perform as you would expect it to since they are mostly low level benchmarks. In order to test and see the performance improvements in a drive like the Seagate Momentus XT you can only use benchmark applications like PCMark Vantage and SYSmark 07. We showed you that in the PCMark Vantage test suite that the Momentus XT Hybrid drive was able to perform more than twice as fast as the Momentus 7200.4 hard drive...

Article Title: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1310/1/

An interesting read and good to know. Thanks.

My wife has been complaining lately about the speed of her laptop and this may be just the thing to get some more life out of it. It's only a couple of years old but it's running on 5400 RPM drive. I'm not sure she would be down with an SSD based on their prices but this seems to be right in a sweet spot in both price and performance.

yup, for the casual user the Momentus XT is ideal... Moving her up from a 5400 RPM drive that is a few years old to the Seagate Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive would nearly double her performance for say boot times and application load times. This is due to the 7200 RPM drive, larger 32MB cache and of course the 4GB of SLC NAND!

Very interesting product!

Definitely an interesting idea. Seems like a good compromise.

On of our readers sent over an e-mail letting us know that Newegg now has the Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drives listed for sale. The have The Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB listed for $129.99 with an ETA of 05/27/2010. This is well below the $156 MSRP that we were given for the drive. With a price like this it really is a cost effective way to improve performance on your system without paying the big bucks for an SSD.

Here is the link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... entus%20xt

And one final note, an SSD will have write amplification due to background 'garbage collection' of partially used blocks. This is necessary on the SSD to retain the write performance by maintaining a certain amount of erased blocks. Because the Solid State Hybrid also has the resources of a disc our Flash file system has very little write amplification." Seagate Engineering

But does an SLC-based SSD need garbage collection? I thought only MLC-based SSDs needed that due to the read-modify-write method used for writing to MLC flash, and that SLC does it differently. Am I completely wrong here guys?

Remember this really isn't an SSD and it's OS independent, so it has to have some garbage collection on it through it's own algorithm.

I know you aren't a big fan of RAID 0 but is there any way you can do a follow up test with 2-4 of these drives in RAID 0? I know that the access times won't change much but the read/write benchmarks should really benefit from the added drives.

*EXAMPLE*
I was playing around with a few extra 1TB drives I had laying around and came across some interesting results. This is off the top of my head so don't hold it as an absolute truth.

With ATTO 4MB result
1 drive was roughly 120/85
2 drives were roughly 210/190
3 driver were roughly 320/250

While not completely linear the results were better than most SSD drives you guys have reviewed. While the 4K tests stunk I don't think they are that important. Most files accessed by the drive/downloaded/installed are closer to the 4MB file size than 4K.

Was there any reduction in boot time? If not, how hard do you think it would be for Seagate to make some sort of software/service to install that would cache the files for the OS boot to the flash memory and have the HDD look at the flash first when booting up?

FeRaL wrote:Was there any reduction in boot time? If not, how hard do you think it would be for Seagate to make some sort of software/service to install that would cache the files for the OS boot to the flash memory and have the HDD look at the flash first when booting up?

yeah it reduces boot up times by ~35% from what I can see on Windows 7 from the 7200.4 drive.

Awesome, sounds like an easy sell to the wife then.

These have been getting great reviews but from the looks of the Newegg reviews there are a LOT of bad eggs, looks like the failure rate is pretty high.

gcstang wrote:These have been getting great reviews but from the looks of the Newegg reviews there are a LOT of bad eggs, looks like the failure rate is pretty high.

im using mine as file storage and where I put all my big applications (my 90GB Steam folder, office, photoshop etc.) using my old 7200.10 Barracuda as the OS-only drive

skier wrote:

gcstang wrote:These have been getting great reviews but from the looks of the Newegg reviews there are a LOT of bad eggs, looks like the failure rate is pretty high.

im using mine as file storage and where I put all my big applications (my 90GB Steam folder, office, photoshop etc.) using my old 7200.10 Barracuda as the OS-only drive

Can I ask where you purchased yours, if it's other than Newegg...maybe they got a bad batch?

gcstang wrote:Can I ask where you purchased yours, if it's other than Newegg...maybe they got a bad batch?

it is a possiblility i suppose, likely people have bad luck but most people just complain about it because it is too loud (as it is for notebooks and everyone is used to 5400RPM drives in notebooks). i got mine direct from Seagate though (Seagate official Blog Contest), mine currently has 555 hours on, #ST95005620AS, runs a fair bit cooler than my 7200.10 Barracuda as well (5C difference when stacked on top of eachother atop my desk)

skier wrote:

gcstang wrote:Can I ask where you purchased yours, if it's other than Newegg...maybe they got a bad batch?

it is a possiblility i suppose, likely people have bad luck but most people just complain about it because it is too loud (as it is for notebooks and everyone is used to 5400RPM drives in notebooks). i got mine direct from Seagate though (Seagate official Blog Contest), mine currently has 555 hours on, #ST95005620AS, runs a fair bit cooler than my 7200.10 Barracuda as well (5C difference when stacked on top of eachother atop my desk)

Thank you for the information, I'll pass it along to my coworkers. We've been looking for something a little cheaper than an SSD that can sustain decent speeds when writing large websites, with vm, database and all running on laptops it tends to be a lot of IO waiting time on the 7200RPM drives.