Hands On: Seagate Momentus XT 2.5-Inch Hybrid Drive Lab-Tested!

Posted 05/24/2010 at 4:43pm | by Nathan Edwards

Last year, during research for some project or another, we asked Seagate an offhand question about hybrid drives. Where nearly everybody said that hybrid drives (last seen circa 2005) were dead, Seagate said that the technology had shown promise, but that they had no further comment. We immediately assumed that meant they were working on one, and to our immense satisfaction, today Seagate announced the Momentus XT, a 2.5-inch hybrid drive featuring 500GB of 7200rpm mechanical storage, 4GB SLC NAND flash, and a 32MB cache.

The Seagate Momentus XT: 500GB of hybrid power.

With the Momentus XT series, Seagate is trying to bridge the gap between SSD performance (and price) and notebook hard drive capacity (and price), by adding 4GB of SLC NAND flash memory to a standard notebook hard drive. The drive uses an algorithm called Seagate Adaptive Memory to move the most frequently-accessed files to the NAND flash memory, so the drive should get faster as it tailors itself to each user’s demands. Maximum PC will publish a full review of the Momentus XT in an upcoming issue of the magazine, but we had a chance to run the drive through its paces.

We didn’t expect to see SSD-level speeds from this drive, and we didn’t. But our initial testing showed that the drive performed very well for a 2.5-inch mechanical drive and got better with repeated testing, a good indication that the adaptive algorithm was, well, adapting to our test procedures. Normally, a drive’s performance on the PCMark Vantage HDD subtest doesn’t vary much. But the Momentus XT’s first three runs averaged 5400 PCMarks, and the scores continued to rise until the drive stabilized around 6950 PCMarks—for reference, the average current-gen SandForce SSD gets around 35,000 and the latest Velociraptor, 7,500.

Seagate cautions that raw read/write benchmarks “are not a good measure of the actual performance benefit that an end user will experience,” but we’re including them anyway because that’s how we roll. 80MB/s average sustained reads and writes, while nowhere near SSD performance, are nothing to sneeze at in a 500GB drive. Random-access time varies sharply from .1ms (for files stored on the SLC NAND) to 17.3ms (for the rest).

The 500GB Momentus XT has an MSRP of $156, or about $75 more than a standard 500GB laptop drive. Of course, a typical SSD with half that capacity (but three times the speed) costs four times as much. At not much more than a standard 2.5-inch hard drive of the same capacity, we can see hybrid drives catching on in a big way.

Benchmarks

	Seagate Momentus XT	OCZ Vertex 2	WD Velociraptor
Capacity	500GB	100GB	600GB
HDTune Avg Sustained Read (MB/s)	82.6	228.1	132.6
HDTune Avg Sustained Write (MB/s)	82.2	223.5	130.4
HDTune Random Access Read (ms)	0.3*, 17.3	0.1	7.1
HDTune Random Access Write (ms)	0.1*, 17.3	0.1	7.1
HDTune Burst Read (MB/s)	179.6	227.7	201.2
HDTune Burst Write (MB/s)	175.1	206.3	196.4
HDTune 4KB Random Read IOPS	1970	8122	139
HDTune 4KB Random Write IOPS	111	8570	321
Premiere Pro (sec)	431	363	291
PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Subscore	6953	33296	7467

*Asterisk denotes random-access time for files on flash memory. All other files use second score. All drives tested on our hard drive test bench: A stock-clocked Intel i7-920 CPU on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R with 6GB DDR3, running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. All tests performed using Intel southbridge SATA chipset with Windows 7 default AHCI drivers unless specified

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pbalstar

May 25, 2010 at 11:42pm

It is very likely. i dont feel like explaining, but you would get problems with alignment, and trim. its just so wierd. It would be like putting 2 ssd's in raid 0, just really not a good idea: Its not that you dont want the speed (we do!) but that even though it is raid 0'd it would not change the access times (which is the absolute most awesome spectacular things about ssds). i have 2 computers 1 ssd boot (160 mb's read) and one comp with 2 hdd's with 180 mb's read. Geuss which one loads windows 7 20 seconds faster?. the ssd. so yea. just leave the drive to be.

AETAaAS

May 25, 2010 at 4:22am

I am wondering does the algorithm move 'files' or 'clusters' to the flash memory? If two of these drives were put into RAID0, would it cause some sort of error?

EthicSlave

May 24, 2010 at 11:04pm

However if you have say maybe a docking station with even a 3.5" bay you could use the vr200m. I dont see any reason they have not made a mobile version of this 2.5" drive.

WD6000BLHX is a retail version of just the drive without the cooling adapter to fit 3.5".

WD6000HLHX is the retail version we all know with the above adapter that helps in cooling the drive. (3.5")

Perhaps the drive is 1/10th of an inch to tall (WD could and should have made this drive available for mobile computing)

quickone

May 24, 2010 at 7:52pm

Wow, how underwhelming...

~~The difference between insanity and genius is merely succes~~

Keith E. Whisman

May 24, 2010 at 9:21pm

Actually those are pretty great numbers for a laptop hard drive. I would love to have that drive in this laptop. That is gotta be the fastest laptop mechanical hard drive available today. For the money it's a great deal too. I was thinking about getting an SSD but they are just too expensive. Those numbers are about what you can get with a standard desk top hard drive.

cheungster

May 24, 2010 at 5:41pm

i appreciate the early review, but how about a control group (i.e. a 5400 speed non high-end hard drive) to compare it to? I have no reference point here because I don't own a high speed drive in my laptop.

nedwards

May 24, 2010 at 5:43pm

We just wanted to get a few numbers up. We're getting a few current-gen notebook hard drives in to test for the actual review. The Velociraptor was just there because it's one of the few mechanical hard drives we've tested on our current hdd/ssd testbed, so we have concrete numbers for it.

Carmaine

May 24, 2010 at 5:32pm

I didn't know they made a 600 GB Velociraptor for notebooks!!

Ok, but anyway, I'm no expert here. So call me out if I'm wrong, but why are you guys comparing this to high end desktop hard drives? I understand why you compared them, but coming from a laptop customer; by looking at these numbers, I'm not exactly sold. Why not compare them to high end LAPTOP hard drives and see how a new hybrid stacks up against them? Such as the Seagate Savvio 10K.3 or the notebook 150GB velociraptor?

elo231

May 24, 2010 at 7:43pm

Since the connectors for SATA is the exact same on desktop and notebook hard drives. They tested the drives on a desktop system as stated in the fine print, under the benchmarks. Also the 600GB velociraptor is a desktop drive, not for notebooks.

Carmaine

May 24, 2010 at 8:10pm

Sorry, I guess I was a bit vague there with the sarcasm. Yes, I know that the 600GB Velociraptor is desktop only. I pointed out that statement because I was confused why it's being tested against high end desktop hard drives, which is what I clearly said on the 3rd sentence. =P

Sorry for the confusion =)

burntjuggalas

May 24, 2010 at 5:30pm

the 500GB versions are on newegg and tigerdirect for 129.99 already =D

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Hands On: Seagate Momentus XT 2.5-Inch Hybrid Drive Lab-Tested!