Momentus XT!

Crazy talk! Nigh-on all laptops can only take one hard drive. I don't want to be spending £300 on a 100GB SSD when I can get a 500GB XT for £120 and have all my data on that without lugging around an additional usb hard drive. The whole point is that it is faster than standard laptop 2.5" drives by having some of the benefits of SSD (quicker access time, better battery life) but at a vastly reduced price and without the crippling capacity.

I suppose really we're looking at the age old hot hatch vs supercar - you'll get 75% of the performance from a hothatch and loads more practicality but definately lacks the desirability and crazy fast aspect of a supercar! :p
 
I still think people are not entirely understanding what this aims to be for. I was looking at upgrading the HDD in my new MBP because i thought the 5400RPM standard HDD would have been fine, but it is a bit slow. This gets announced and i think going off the reviews it could be worth it, i know - i don't expect it to be a massive improvement, i don't expect it even to be a 'great' improvement, but i can see it being an improvement nonetheless. I'd love to stick an SSD into my laptop, but i have one hard drive bay and anything less than 500gb in there is not enough.

I'll take the gamble.
 
[ZiiP]carrot;16616837 said:
....and then regret spending such a small amount of money. You get what ya pay for (which isn't much at all)
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I have no idea how good or bad that cheap Patriot may or may not be ...it will almost certainly perform better than that Seagate though.
 
I'll wait to see how it does in something like the AnandTech traces to get a better impression of real world performance and how intelligent the caching algorithm is, but as mentioned above my gut instinct is that it's way overpriced.
 
Moeks said:
I have no idea how good or bad that cheap Patriot may or may not be ...it will almost certainly perform better than that Seagate though.
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Wasn't a go at you, just a very bad experience with them (yes...it was faster after waiting 2 months for the firmware...and then it died after 3 weeks :rolleyes:)

If I wasn't desperate for one of these, I'd be grabbing one for my laptop. Just a shame it doesn't actually have a HDD in there at the moment and my Samsung m7 arriving today. Makes total sense to me though...just depends on how well it 'learns' what files to put on the SSD bit and also how often it swaps over.
 
I personally don't see the point in this product. I'd much rather buy a new laptop that comes with a 500Gb HDD, an Intel X25-V and a 2.5" external USB enclosure. All that plus a large USB stick should satisfy almost everyone's storage needs, whilst being fast, power efficient and relatively cost effective.
 
roadie said:
I personally don't see the point in this product. I'd much rather buy a new laptop that comes with a 500Gb HDD, an Intel X25-V and a 2.5" external USB enclosure. All that plus a large USB stick should satisfy almost everyone's storage needs, whilst being fast, power efficient and relatively cost effective.
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It is just that though, personal preference. If you're travelling a lot you may not want to take a 2.5" external enclosure around. Especially if you need to access the external files all the time. Hopefully some decent 3.5" versions will arrive soon!
 
I think this would make a good notebook drive for me, a little faster than mechanical drives, plenty of storage space for media, looks good, just needs a price to match.
 
I started reading into this product earlier. I think the tech could get quite interesting -- what if we took a desktop drive and added a more agressive nand cache to it? (obviously that would drive the price up though)
Or what about a 10k RPM HD with a nand cache? ;)

I think prices need to come down slightly for this to really take off, though. But I'm sure that will happen after a few months as with any HDD.
 
When theres a hard drive platter, thats the limiting factor, the cache can only be filled up as fast as the platter can read data, the limit, is the platter, every situation a normal mechanical drive would suck in, these likely will.

The results are entirely unimpressive to start with, the Anandtech with a normal 7200rpm and the best 2.5" hdd thrown in and, it will look even less impressive.

Really are some odd choices in terms of what hard drives to bench them against.
 
The anandtech review is worth a read as they seem to have found the best way to review this drive, check out eh Windows 7 boot times. On a first boot the Momentus was a few seconds quicker then a regular hard drive but the more after repeating the test several times the Momentus learnt what files to write and store in cache which really smashed boot times.
 
Completely unfounded but this just strikes me as the type of thing that gets dogged by dodgy firmware issues.
 
drunkenmaster said:
When theres a hard drive platter, thats the limiting factor, the cache can only be filled up as fast as the platter can read data, the limit, is the platter, every situation a normal mechanical drive would suck in, these likely will.

The results are entirely unimpressive to start with, the Anandtech with a normal 7200rpm and the best 2.5" hdd thrown in and, it will look even less impressive.

Really are some odd choices in terms of what hard drives to bench them against.
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Provided the SSD NAND is used to store the early parts of commonly used files it could greatly reduce seek times whilst the head seeks.
 
SirCanealot said:
I started reading into this product earlier. I think the tech could get quite interesting -- what if we took a desktop drive and added a more agressive nand cache to it? (obviously that would drive the price up though)
Or what about a 10k RPM HD with a nand cache? ;)

I think prices need to come down slightly for this to really take off, though. But I'm sure that will happen after a few months as with any HDD.
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10k drives are expensive enough - Icant see how they could factor in the NAND cache cost and still keep it below cost of SSD

(mind you I did see the OCUK cost of a 512GB SSD just now, not knocking OCUK but :eek::eek::eek:)

I am surprised at how slow (comparatively) ssd sizes are rising though
 
FrankJH said:
I am surprised at how slow (comparatively) ssd sizes are rising though
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They could technically build massive SSD's, but there's no market for them, If you have thousands to spend on SSD storage, you go RAID instead.

Average Drive sizes should go up a bit at the end of the year with 25nm NAND though, I think Intel are planning on a 600GB SSD, but that's still likely to cost well over £1000.
 
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