Seagate Officially Launches Hybrid Hard Drive
Seagate Officially Launches Hybrid Hard Drive
Posted 05/24/2010 at 6:49am
| by Paul Lilly
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We knew Seagate was cooking up a hybrid hard drive that would combine an SSD and HDD under the same hood, but most of the information we had was based on speculation and leaked specs. Things are a bit more concrete now, as Seagate today officially unveiled what it claims is the "world's fastest hard drive for laptop computers."
It's called the Momentus XT and it comes in three capacities, including 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB. These hybrid drives will sport 4GB of fast SLC NAND solid state memory, a 7200RPM spindle speed, 32MB of drive-level cache, and SATA 3Gb/s with NCQ.
"We see the Momentus ® XT drive as a game changer, a product heralding a new generation of hard drives that combine SSD and HDD capabilities so that laptop users don’t have to make trade-offs on speed, cost or capacity," said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of Sales, Marketing and Product Line Management.
To squeeze the most performance out of its hybrid drive, Seagate has implemented what it calls Adaptive Memory technology. What this does is analyze patterns in how often certain digital data is used and then moves the most frequently used bits to the embedded solid state memory for faster access.
Image Credit: Seagate
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GuavaSauce
May 24, 2010 at 4:56pm
now, dont hang me for this comment, but does the boot process require the reading of the whole 20GB of the OS installation? how much is required to boot? is there a minimum of data required to load to get into the OS? just wondering. Also, there's already a number of reviews up at pchardwareblips and the drives look promising. they include raid0 too. one spt listed the 250gb drive at $113. still would like more memory, maybe next gen?
DOAcepr
May 24, 2010 at 11:26am
This looks just like the Silverstone HDD Boost except for laptops. Except with the HDD Boost you can customize the SSD and HDD. I have to agree with others on this one... what is the point of 4G of Flash... if your going to do it, do it right with atleast 30G of flash.
133794m3r
May 24, 2010 at 12:00pm
needless to say this is just like those Turbo-Boosts that were being slapped onto laptops in the past for 200$ it was 2GB or 4GB and it was pure flash memory added onto your laptop the 200$ was for the 4GB model if i recall correctly. Thisis the same exact thing. 4GB NAND flash isn't exactly anything as the person who i replied to said. If they're going to do it, i agree that it should be something like 30GB. Since the OS itself is going to be(in most cases) 4GB and that's where MOST of your stuff's going to be coming from. So only making it 4GB does little to nothing to help you. 30GB would give the end user ~14GB of space for their various others apps(if they're using windows 7 vista's something like 20GB i think?) so they'd still be able to get that performance boost.
Fecal Face
May 24, 2010 at 10:47am
I just don't see the point in having 4GB of SSD memory.
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GuavaSauce
May 24, 2010 at 11:06am
i half feel that too. the most common used apps get loaded into the SSD along with the OS right? after the OS info get loaded, how much room is left for apps? would more slc mem be benificail as cost per gb?
NEED A REVIEW MAX!!!
GuavaSauce
May 24, 2010 at 10:14am
4GB of SLC memory, and a 7200rpm hdd, is this something that a benchmark could really show in speeds? if only the most common apps get to use the SLC mem, everything else is at hdd speeds ~80 MBps? the site says I/O speeds are 300MBps, im gonna guess thats just for common apps/OS coming off the ssd side. seems cool, even though i think its very situational. loadf steam and bfbc2 fatser.
Keith E. Whisman
May 24, 2010 at 8:01am
What are the dimensions of this drive? Will it fit in the standard 9.5MM space that most laptops provide for Hard drives?
gendoikari1
May 24, 2010 at 8:23am
From the Seagate site:
PHYSICAL
Height 9.7mm (0.378 in)
Width 70.10mm (2.76 in)
Length 100.55mm (3.959 in)
Weight (typical) 110g (.238 lb)
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