Seagate Hybrid-HDD-SSD Unveiled for Notebooks
Seagate's new drive will toss your most-used data into its built-in NAND flash memory for a huge performance boost.
Last week we reported that Seagate was teasing the press with a "game changing" device that would be revealed this week. Additional reports indicated that it would be a hybrid drive that combined the capacities and low costs of a hard drive with the speed of a solid state disk. Holding true to its promise, Seagate on Monday revealed the Momentus XT drive, slated to be the fastest 2.5-inch laptop hard drive ever created.
The concept is simply awesome: merging 7200rpm platters (250 GB, 320 GB, and 500 GB) with 4 GB of SLC NAND flash. Seagate's Adaptive Memory technology combines the two by identifying patterns in how often certain digital data is used. The most frequently used data is thus moved to the solid state memory for faster access. In essence, it's tailor made to each individual user while offering a huge performance gain in return.
"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.
In addition to Seagate's announcement, ASUS said that it will offer the new Momentus XT drive as an upgrade option for its new Republic of Gamers (ROG) G73jh notebook. ASUS said that the drive installs as easily as a traditional 9.5-mm-high notebook drive for new systems or laptop upgrades. And unlike prior hybrid solutions, the Momentus XT operates independently of the OS and the motherboard chipset.
Now we just need a desktop model!
And a price tag!
True... but it is much easier to do it ourselves instead of pushing those big companies (MS, Apple, .....) to do what we want them to do...
If Seagate can increase the flash memory to 8G and give us the option to keep half of them for the OS start-up... it will be great.... and of course... keep the price $20 within the none-hybrid version....
I worry about the detection mechanism. I mean, I only boot my computer up once a day, but I might start a separate application multiple times in a session. How will this drive know that my system DLLs are more important than my notepad.exe executable? Will it consider the amount of time taken to load the file (i.e. notepad.exe is very small and quick to load) as opposed to simply the number of times a file is accessed?
This could be a nice bridge into SSD drives, at least laptop wise until prices of large drives come down...but that's all it will ever be SSD drives are the future.
Unfortunetely, I don't think they'll use fast controllers, fast flash, or enough flash, so these hybrid drives will be relegated to laptop use only.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd
Different testing, different conclusion. THG's review relies on conventional testing methods, that don't really show its caching abilities.
You have your first level extremely high bandwidth cache (16-64MB), your decently high output second level cache (4GB) and then your bulky junk (500GB).
Or maybe I should just get some sleep...
Very insightful!
That was a great article. Thanks!
I have one is my system and Windows starts up in seconds and it really hauls butt. Write speeds are off a little bit, but read speeds come through at full SSD speeds. I'm surprised that TOM's didn't mention this device because this does exactly what this "hybrid" drive does, and for the person who says, "Where is this for the desktop", its here, and it works, and works extremely well. I have a 1 TB Hitatchi with a 64GB A-Data SSD 230 read,110-130 write.... best of both worlds, no reinstall and a boot time that went from over a minute to 15 seconds.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817997011&Tpk=HDDBOOST
I will advocate all day for the Silverstone HDDBOOST. That thing has gone beyond all expectations of load time and ease of use. There are some negatives, such as lack of SMART and such, but Hardware Canucks did a great review of the unit and found it stunning. What you won't find stunning is the canned review suites that write a temp file, and then read it... it will never make it to the SSD drive and you will never see the score. This is all explained in the documentation.
Overall if you are looking for something like this but don't want to resetup your system, buy the Silverstone HDD boost and the biggest SSD you can afford and enjoy. It is actually so easy to use that to upgrade to a bigger SSD you power the system down, slide out the old ssd and slide in the new one... no cables nothing....
The windows load time still blow my mind... Never short of using sleep would I think I would see the day that Windows would load in less than 20 seconds... and thats with SQL 2005 and 2008 running in the background for development purposes...
As I said earlier, to the guy that mentioned he wished it were for the desktop... its here... Silverstone HDDBOOST