Seagate hybrid hard drive review

Earlier this year, Seagate promised to flip the 2.5-inch HDD industry upside-down, however it wouldn\’t achieve this by way of an SSD in sheep\’s clothing. Rather, it\’d be dispensing a new breed of harddisk, person who actually has a pinch of pure, unadulterated NAND inside for choosing up the pace in certain scenarios. The belief of a hybrid hard drive isn\’t totally new, but the Momentus XT is likely one of the first hybrid HDDs to truly make it out of the lab and into the hands of shoppers. Essentially the mostsome of the most intriguing aspect of the drive is the worth — at around $130, it\’s slightly below half as pricey as Seagate\’s conventional 500GB Momentus 7200.4. That uptick in price isn\’t nothing, however it\’s still far not up to what you\’d pay for a 2.5-inch SSD with half the capacity. We\’ve already shown you the benchmarks, so we figured we\’d slap this bad boy in our main rig for a number of weeks to peer if we actually noticed any real-world performance increases to justify the pricetag. Head on past the break for our two pennies.

The Momentus XT is a curious beast. It actually doesn\’t reveal its true colors when taxed in standard benchmarks, which makes a longer-term, real-world evaluation of it that way more important. You spot, this 500 gigger actually has 4GB of NAND onboard, but given just how small 4GB is relating to the alternative 496GB, the drive obviously needs to be extra choosy when determining what goes where. Standard benchmarks will prove that a straight-up read / write on this drive is analogous to any other 7,200RPM drive of this caliber. Frankly, there\’s no real gains in case you\’re using the drive to shuffle 30GB files from server to server every day. The total point of this drive is to make \” the little things\” snappier in everyday use for the common Joe / Jane, largely by evaluating what applications consumers use most and then dedicating the NAND for those high-use apps.

Remember that, there\’s probably not a superb benchmark tool out for that reasonably work. This all sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the genuine question is how does it act in practice. We swapped our standard 7,200RPM drive (also 500GB) out for this unit, cloning the contents along the style. Upon boot, we noticed a 1 – 2 second improvement in how long it took to point out us a useable desktop; hardly Earth-shattering, but a tight start. From there, we fired up Firefox, Photoshop CS5, Skitch, TweetDeck and iTunes in succession. Again, a 1 – 2 second improvement in total load time. But after using the apps for a piece, we shut our machine down and rebooted, doing an identical song and dance once more. And again. And again. We went through this process four total times, with every one getting slightly quicker when it came to load time. When we\’d given it ample opportunity to understand our preferred flow, we noticed a 6 – 8 second improvement in total load time. That won’t sound like lots, but percentage wise it\’s hardly worth sneezing at.

So, if booting up apps was quicker, how\’s in regards to the actual in-app performance? We used Lightroom 2 as our main test bench here, selecting 300 RAW files and waiting as graphical representations of the color balance lit up inside the corner. The variation here was striking. On the prior drive, it took a couple of seconds per image to display graphical elements about any given image; on the Momentus XT, they popped up instantly. One area where we didn\’t see the sort of huge increase in performance was during renders; we exported a 32GB iMovie project into a .mov file for simpler transport, and the full time for the task to finish was essentially an analogous on both drives. Granted, we fully expected one of these behavior, however it goes to reveal that 4GB of NAND won\’t exactly alter your universe when gazing chores that require lengthy reads and writes.

All told, we\’d have a difficult time not recommending the Momentus XT, particularly the 500GB version. When you\’re in little need of that much space, we\’d almost recommend saving up for a pure SSD at 256GB or less. But currently, the fee difference between this drive and the half-as-big solid state drives makes Seagate\’s new alternative that a lot more attractive. We\’d also recommend this only for those that are searching for performance gains within the simplest of tasks; opening your email client, sifting through images in Lightroom, switching between the ten apps you’ve got open, etc. Comically enough, this performance-oriented drive best reveals its talents inside the most mundane of tasks, but find it irresistible or not, that\’s what the bulk of us are buried in from 9 8 to 5. In the event you\’ve outgrown your existing laptop HDD, and you wish to have a capacious replacement, the Momentus XT is an option that\’s definitely worth the price premium in our estimation. It could not make your Core 2 Duo feel like a Core i7, however it\’ll definitely get your during the day with a number of less pinwheels / hourglasses.

Source

This post is tagged: drive, hybrid, seagate