• Seagate Momentus XT 500GB

    Seagate Momentus XT 500GB

    Jayesh Limaye, Aug 09, 2010 1615 hrs IST

    Bridges the gap between SSD and traditional hard drives

    Very fast performance, Adaptive Memory technology

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Ever since SSDs have become available in the market, there has been a growing interest in them due to their exceedingly fast performance when compared to the traditional hard drives with spinning platters. But the main deterrent for going for an SSD has been, and still is, the extremely expensive pricing and cost per capacity. Also, SSDs are not as capacious as traditional hard drives. So you have to either compromise on the capacity and money or on performance. But Seagate has launched the Momentus XT hybrid hard drive, which is an amalgamation of an SSD and a traditional hard drive, which claims to give you the best of both worlds. The performance is touted to be somewhere between SSD and traditional hard drive.

Features



The Seagate Momentus XT 500GB hard drive looks like any other ordinary 2.5-inch hard drive. The 500GB capacity is good enough for today's data hungry applications and operating systems, while the 32MB cache buffer ensures smooth and continuous data transfer.



Just like any other SATA hard drive, it has a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface and a power connector.

The difference is under the hood. This is a hybrid hard drive consisting of an SSD part and a traditional rotating platter part. The platters spin at 7,200 RPM and can hold 500GB of data. The SSD part consists of 4GB of SLC NAND Flash memory from Micron.



Before I read about it, I was under the impression that the SSD part would be a partition where the OS would be installed, while the rotating platters would serve for storing data. But when I found that the SSD had a capacity of just 4GB, then the idea was not feasible, since 4GB would not be enough for an OS such as Windows 7. The hard drive appears as a normal 500GB hard drive to the operating system (in our case Windows 7), while the 4GB SSD is not visible at all and cannot be accessed by the user. The drive has an eASIC controller, which coordinates the optimization procedures for the drive to yield better performance.

What this controller does is, it learns the user's usage pattern and places the most accessed files on the SSD, so that the files are loaded faster, thus improving the overall system performance. The technology we are talking about is known as Adaptive Memory technology, which customizes performance by aligning to user needs for overall improved system performance. Since this is a hardware thing, it is independent of the operating system. If you are wondering as to what may happen if the SSD part fails, then in such an unlikely case, the data on the SSD won't be lost because it is always mirrored on the rotating platter part of the hard drive.

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Seagate Momentus XT 500GB seagate SSD hard disk Adaptive Memory technology Hitachi 7K500 A-DATA S592



Discussion Board
(2) Comments
Sreekanth Yelic
,Mysore, on Jul 16, 2011 02:18 PM
"The drive is using Adaptive memory technology so the users need not be disappointed by the test results as it may perform better after it understands the usage patterns etc." They why did the review team test the drive only after there is a considerable usage time of the drive. This is exactly where tech sites and experts can take the lead. When you say a review, please make it complete and do not leave it for the user saying something. A review is a review only if it makes a complete sense to the user. We can't expect less techie people to assume the drive performs better after some time of usage and so they can afely buy it. The review should give a full pledged verdict. Anyways, the review is nice. My verdict: Just now checked the price of this product on ebay. It is ~ Rs. 7200/- It would be better to buy a normal HDD and an USB 3.0 external HDD rather than buying particular a hybrid drive like this.
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keith
,delhi, on Aug 12, 2010 11:27 PM
well the price is actually 4 times higher. The generic seagate 500GB HDD sell for. It still not worth 8100 for a 500GB but definitely a better option over expensive SSD.
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