Momentus XT!

Just noticed reviews of these popping up on the internet. Looks very promising, and as mentioned, hard to benchmark, as the hard drive "learns" over time what files and programs to cache in its 4gb SSD.

Wonder what prices of these will be like in UK...maybe around the £100 mark?
 
Just noticed reviews of these popping up on the internet. Looks very promising, and as mentioned, hard to benchmark, as the hard drive "learns" over time what files and programs to cache in its 4gb SSD.

Wonder what prices of these will be like in UK...maybe around the £100 mark?

Yeah, another site has the 500gb version up for pre order for £108.
 
Hmm, at those prices I don't think it's worth it. I'd rather get a proper small SSD boot drive for boot+apps and use existing mechanical drives for large files - For £108 you're not far off an X25-V and an external 500GB drive. 4GB cache just isn't enough and sequential speeds are still half that of an SSD.
If they can get prices down to around £50 or less the drive would be a lot more attractive.

As a laptop drive it does have the added advantage of being all-in-one though.
 
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Its crap basically, the places it does well are "benchmark" numbers that mean little, where it sucks, is where normal mechanical drives suck and where SSD's beat them by absolutely miles.

On top of that their results are horrible, Crystal disk mark and as ssd should both have the 7200.11 WAY faster than they show it, and 10% cpu utilisation for a single 7200.11, theres something completely wrong with their computer yet they show the results.

Likewise As ssd/CDM both show the 4kb write lower than read(its the other way around on EVERY other bench on every other review in the world) and 4kb 64q threaded results are awful, a C300 is around 220mb/s for the 4kb threaded, a Vertex 2 should be WAY over 100mb/s, they have it around 40-50mb/s.

They've benchmarked it badly, or purposefully shown the momentus better than it is, don't know the site enough to say which. Anyone with half a brain should see a 3.5" 7200rpm drive will get better sequentials than a 2.5" 7200rpm, its a joke.

When you look at the scores in AS ssd, in reality its barely ahead of a normal drive though doesn't cost that much more, but its just worthless.

It sucks at access times(look at random access times in the proper benchmarks, its worse than a single 3.5" 7200rpm drive), it sucks at IOPS, it sucks at sequential read, it sucks, everywhere.

Go for an SSD that will blow it completely away, or get a couple cheapo 3.5" drives in raid.

So horrible review because most of the results are pretty much wrong, and it still looks like a pointless drive, marginally faster than a normal mechanical hdd, at a higher cost, faster in all the wrong places, as slow or slower in the most important ones.

An upgrade compared to utterly crap old 2.5" laptop hdd's, sure, an upgrade to a 3.5" normal drive for a desktop, not even close, a sidegrade at best, a waste of money.

A better review from storage review puts it exactly where it is, in one/two limited situations it can rival a Raptor, in most situations its marginally, and I mean incredibly marginally ahead of other laptop mechanical hdd's, utterly pointless drives.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2944/10

Check the 4kb aligned random reads are the kinds of results SSD's should have shown in that first review, instead of 140mb/s + they showed, 40mb's, on that graph the momentus would have been dead last, so far away from competitive performance its laughable.
 
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/3

Remember the Agility 2 is articifially limited in both 4kb random read and write, and its still about 100 times faster than the momentus, a Vertex 2(basically the same cost, I have no idea who'd buy an Agility 2 for £5 less) will get 150mb/s read and 100mb/s or so write, so triple and double the performance.

In vantage and other things they have it not much ahead of its normal far cheaper 5400.4 seagate drive, the Western Digi 2.5" drive, also far cheaper is quite a lot faster.

Its a little surprising/dissappointing the lack of hdd's used. Few people have raptors, wheres the "normal" 7200rpm drives for comparison? Likewise why not bench the single fastest 2.5" mechanical drive to compare if the extra expense is worth it, instead they benchmark maybe the fastest 3.5" drive, but overly expensive drive, and the worst 2.5" drive, in those circumstances the increased cost/middle performance of the Momentus looks good. When you add in a much better/same cost 2.5" drive and a FAR cheaper 7200rpm 3.5" drive thats got 98% the performance or a raptor, the Momentus will look completely different.
 
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These are notebook drives, they're not really supposed to be desktop replacements and i don't think they're really supposed to be SSD competitors. Just to give a speed boost over conventional drives. By the sounds of the technology, i don't think they would be easily benchmarked either.
 
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SSD will blow it out the water, but saying the Seagate Momentus sucks is a bit extreme... I have the enterprise version of the 7200.4 in my laptop and the only issue with it is it get very warm - but thats to be expected when you shove a 7200RPM drive in a laptop. In every respect it puts up performance on par with desktop 7200RPM drives with default acoustic management and if you change it for performance over sound/thermal it increases performance by 16% in every regard.
 
One thing I know that can confuse numbers comparing 2.5" to 3.5" is that platter density is like a generation ahead on 2.5" drives. Not enough to beat a 3.5" but enough to seem like its not scaling right. Think of a 5400rpm drive with the old 333gb platters to a newer 5400rpm with the current 500gb platters

I don't know the reason why they do 2.5" first but I believe that is standard.
 
Erm. Find me a 500GB SSD for anywhere near the price of the Seagate XT. For the price/performance the XT looks like fantastic value .

But it doesn't work like a 500GB SSD, this is only any real benefit if you absolutely must have only 1 drive that can do it all. Even with a laptop I'm not convinced, I'd rather have a small fast SSD in the laptop for 90% of it's use and carry an external bus powered drive for storage when needed.

You can buy a 32GB Patriot SSD for £65 and a 500GB 2.5" HD for £50 if you so wish, or 1TB desktop drive for that.
 
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It has great access times over the normal mechanical seagate from 12s to 0.3s. I think it would be a step up from normal HDD but not at release prices.
 
Maybe, but look at the 4K reads and writes though, small random reads and writes are what will make the differance in how 'snappy' your desktop experience feels, they are hardly any better than a standard mechanical drive in this regard and get absolutely smoked by the SSD's, according to the first review posted. I haven't read Anandtech's yet but I will do.
 
It's almost double the conventional HDD but it's nowhere near SSD performance. Like I said, it'd be better at lower prices.
 
Yes, at half the price it'd be very interesting I think. Although I'm still not sure I would ever have any real use for one myself.
 
You can buy a 32GB Patriot SSD for £65

....and then regret spending such a small amount of money. You get what ya pay for (which isn't much at all)

This makes sense for those non techie minded people around us though, ok we know how to have multiple drives working, different partitions etc etc etc but I can imagine it working well in pre-built laptops and stuff. Hell, imagine the purple brand advertising :rolleyes:
 
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