Seagate Momentus XT 500 Price Review

Capacity: 500 GB

481 of 487 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars For certain use scenarios, it is an unbeatable cost/gig percentage, August 9, 2010
By Steve S. (Chicago, IL USA) See all my reviews This review is from: Seagate Momentus XT 250 GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32 MB Cache 2.5 Inch hard State Hybrid Drive ST92505610AS Bare Drive (Personal Computers) I have the 500GB variant of this drive. I also use and used SSD’s with SLC and MLC flash, JMicron controllers, Samsung Controllers, Barefoot controllers, and SandForce controllers on 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems. I have used some number of generations of Raptors, and 3Ware RAID controllers. I am not saying that to brag, I am saying it to point out I have a reasonable base for comparison and expectation.

Here’s what the drive does well: it is alignment and OS agnostic, so it doesn’t care if you run it unaligned on older XP systems. It’ll, over about five cycles, learn what you do and optimize it. You’ll notice your system boots much faster. It excels on systems where you boot into your OS and do the same basic tasks, open MS office and Firefox and viewpoint.

Here’s what the drive doesn’t do well: If you’re constantly changing what you run on your computer, your drive will constantly be “learning” what you do. I have also found it doesn’t do well with remote desktop apps that are constantly caching image data.

Here’s what the drive does that makes it no better or worse than any other mechanical drive: If you’re using the drive to store music or videos or such, they’re going to go the the platters. Then it is just another good, high performance 7200RPM notebook drive. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Here’s the KILLER APP reason to purchase this drive: I took a 32 bit Vista Home Premium laptop that was so congested and clogged with programs, leftovers of removed programs, fragmentation, you name it, and just cloned it to this drive. The mechanical drive it was on took literally five minutes to get to a useful state on the desktop. This drive, after about five boots, learned that our family needed Vista OS, Chrome for Farmville, and iTunes. We now have 30 second boots and though the drive is still loading services and such, we can launch apps now at the desktop. Our main apps either snap open, or in the case of iTunes launch about 3x faster. It is not subtle, it is big.

If you want a drive that doesn’t have alignment issues with older OS’s, and can be used mainly on a computer that does about the same kinds of things over and over, this drive will make a big difference for you. And since it is SLC cache, it is enterprise class lasting in that regard. As well, it mirrors its flash to the mechanical drive, if the flash fails, it just becomes a regular mechanical drive, sort of like a run flat tire.

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256 of 267 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars Cost/Performance agreement vs SSD; Speed Tests, August 19, 2010
By J. Cullen “researcher” (Boston, MA) See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME) This review is from: Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 2.5 Inch hard State Hybrid Drive ST95005620AS (Personal Computers) I replaced my 500GB 5400rpm WD with this Momentus XT after doing exhausting research. I use my MacBoook Pro laptop for analytical work involving big datsets. Here is why I settled on the Momentus XT vs an SSD.

Momentus XT
4GB SLC SSD integrated into the hard drive for speedy access usually used files
Though not as fast as an SSD, but soooo much cheaper than 300GB+ of SSD space.
More vibration and a bit more sound than my WD 500GB, but not considerably so.
Mac OS X does not support TRIM. I was worried that a SSD drive could slow down considerably overtime without it.
Toms Hardware greatly suggested it over other 7200 rpm laptop hard drives. See their review for all the techy details.


Note that the integrated SSD can be used only for reading, not for writing. It generally clones your usually used files on the 4GB SSD.

If you need a sweet spot between speed and space this is it. The Momentus has a 4GB SLC SSD integrated into the hard drive which lets for fast reads of usually used data. This translates into really fast application loading like an SSD. It uses a learning algorithm to choose what to store on the SSD so it takes many time to get to best performance.

Most people have many of data that’s accessed rarely on their hard drive. An SSD is overkill since there is not much advantage to to storing rarely accessed on a really fast drive. If you’re accessing nearly your data all the time (like in a server application) then maybe an SSD is for you. For the rest of us there’s the Momentus XT.

I am specific about the sound with my MacBook Pro. The stock 250GB Seagate hard drive my laptop shipped with was virtually undetectable. When I tried the WD 1TB 5400rpm and WD 500GB 5400rpm, I has been disappointed to find that they both made audible white sound like that of a small cpu fan. The Momentus 7200rpm makes somewhat more sound than the WD drives, but not considerably so. It does produce more vibrations than the 5400rpm drives which you may be able to feel if you put your hand on the laptop case, but I’m wanting to live with it for the performance gains. I subtracted one star for the less than best acoustics.

Here are many performance specifications from my MacBook Pro using fast Bench. Note that these times don’t reflect the benefit of the integrated SSD. There reflect only the performance of the hard drive part. The throughput is alike to the WD 1TB 5400rpm which I also reviewed, but the random reading/writing is a bit faster.

QuickBench(TM) 4.0 Test Results
Standard Test Results in MB/Sec

Averages:
Seq. Read 70.815
Seq. Write 59.756
Ran. Read 17.265
Ran. Write 30.618


Table:
(Cycles: 1)
< put map Here > Seq. Read Seq. Write Ran. Read Ran. Write
Four KB 21.829 5.266 0.663 1.675
Eight KB 38.852 10.527 1.24 2.857
16 KB 59.379 21.098 2.932 5.685
32 KB 85.593 37.539 5.519 10.918
64 KB 88.714 68.469 9.239 21.527
128 KB 85.232 118.508 17.088 44.092
256 KB 87.634 106.457 29.255 57.775
512 KB 86.992 85.88 36.296 61.612
1024 KB 83.111 84.061 53.157 69.426
Standard Ave 70.815 59.756 17.265 30.618


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127 of 131 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars Good performance increase for the money, June 28, 2010
By ooglek (Falls Church, VA USA) See all my reviews This review is from: Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 2.5 Inch hard State Hybrid Drive ST95005620AS (Personal Computers) I have read many of reviews, many good, many bad. I think many people have the idea that the product will speed everything up all the time, and this sets bad expectations. What this drive will do is cache frequently used data, like core Operating System files used at boot and usually used applications, and store that data in its 4GB SSD like cache. If your drive already reads and writes pretty fast, about 75 100MBps (megaBytes not bits), other than boot up and application loading, you are not going to notice most of a difference.

I use Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard, and it certainly boots faster (1 minute 30 seconds previous to this disk, now 55 seconds from power on to prepared + all my startup apps running), and usually run applications also start up observably faster.

I upgraded from a bit slower drive, so I see many performance get there, but nothing big.

Overall I got the disk read speeds I looked for faster boot, faster common app loading, and an in general increase in performance by upgrading from a slower drive completely.

This drive will not change your life, unless you’re booting some number of times a day or loading the same data frequently. It is a good drive with the benefit of faster boot and common app loading times, nothing more.

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