Seagate Celebrates 1 Million Solid State Hybrid Drive Shipments

Posted 08/09/2011 at 8:46am | by Paul Lilly

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Do you go for oodles of affordable storage in your next PC build with a mechanical hard drive, or raid your son's piggy bank and splurge on an ultra-fast solid state drive? You could go with both -- SSD for the OS, HDD for storage chores -- but that's the most expensive option of all. There's somewhat of a happy medium available in Seagate's Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive, of which Seagate said it shipped 1 million units since last year. Market research firm IDC says that's just the beginning.

"Seagate's shipment of its one millionth Momentus XT drive is just the beginning of a bright future for solid state hybrid drives," said John Rydning, research director at IDC. "Fast, capacious, and economical hybrid HDD and NAND flash storage solutions like the Momentus XT drive will be found in roughly 25 percent of all new PCs shipped in 2015."

Seagate's Momentus XT solid state hybrid drives try to combine the best of both worlds by pairing a 7200RPM mechanical hard drive of up to 500GB in capacity with 4GB of onboard solid state memory. Frequently accessed data is shuttled over to the fast storage area, in theory giving users the benefits of a solid state drive with the capacity of a traditional hard drive. Does it work? Find out by reading our review here.