Seagate Now Shipping 2nd-Gen Solid State Hybrid Drive
Seagate has improved upon the original Momentus XT hybrid drive with double the NAND and a SATA 6 Gbps interface.
Monday Seagate said that it began shipping its second-generation 2.5-inch solid-state hybrid drive, the Momentus XT, deeming it as the company's fastest drive ever for personal laptop computers. That's because it comes equipped with double the NAND flash than what was available on the first-generation drive, now packing 8 GB of Single Level Cell NAND. Seagate also cranked up the disk capacity to 750 GB while keeping the drive's pricetag hovering at a not-too-shabby $245 USD.
Joni Clark, Seagate's product marketing manager, said on Tuesday that the company switched NAND flash vendors for this model, thus the new drive will have 1.5 times better performance than the first-generation model. The company also switched out the drive's interface, replacing the slower SATA 3 Gbps connector with a zippier SATA 6 Gbps pipeline. This makes the new model 70-percent faster than its predecessor and up to three times faster than a traditional 750 GB hard disk drive.
Also new to the table is what Seagate calls FAST Factor technology. This feature "blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives" and enables faster access to applications, quicker bootup and higher overall system speed. There's also "tweaked" Adaptive Memory technology which identifies data usage patterns, and then moves the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. It effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use over the course of three boot-ups.
Clark said that the new drive will write data on the hard drive platters first and then to the NAND so that data isn't lost if the NAND happens to fail. "If the NAND ever fails, you'll still have a perfectly good 7,200rpm hard drive," she said. "You'll still be able to boot up just like a regular hard drive, but you won't be able to take advantage of the NAND flash."
The Seagate product marketing manager also added that the company conducted performance tests against an Intel consumer-class 320 series SSD. Intel's drive beat Seagate's hybrid on boot times only by two seconds. "The Intel SSD works out to $490 for 160 GB," she said. "Ours costs [$245] for 750 GB. For those two seconds [better boot up time], you'll end up paying an extra $300."
On Tuesday Seagate said that seven original equipment manufacturers are gearing up to ship laptops packing the new Momentus XT drive. It's now available for consumers at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect. But buyer beware: Seagate's new second-generation Momentus XT is a 4K sector drive, and will not play nice with Windows XP or earlier operating systems that only support 512 Kb drives ("tuning" instructions are here). However Apple's Mac OS and recent Linux distributions are equipped to work with 4K drive sectors.

Intel SSDs are a crappy comparison price wise. You could get those two seconds from less cost by pairing a 128GB SSD with a half tb $100 drive for maybe $50 more.
Dang those floods... When will manufacturers learn to diversify their supply chains... Hire some freggin logtistics people, sheesh...
Good for desktops too.
I agree, but the price makes using these in netbooks prohibitive...
That would be whenever they roll out the Barracuda XT.
But how do you do that without breaking partition information? If someone can figure out how to make this an option, but keeping it idiotproof... you have quite a product on your hands...
Ooops
I still can't comprehend that the mechanical part (platter) is more durable than the SSD part. (NAND).
I wonder if these new drives are cheaper than the non hybrid types since the skyrocketing of hard disk prices.
The Momentus XT are hybrid drives. They offer the storage (and overall speed) of a traditional hard drive but combine it with a 4GB (on the original) SSD cache which speeds up overall day to day operation. They make a pretty big difference, although I agree the price on this one is a bit high. When I picked up my 500GB original XT it was I think $100 or $105.
That said, hard drives seem to have jumped in price lately. I had to wait for a cyber monday "deal" to get a 500GB hard drive for $70. I could've swore a year ago you could get a 1.5 TB hard drive for not much more...
Also!
What does this make so much difference when having 16gb (for example) of ram makes hardly any? Since ram is not really a bottleneck, and normal users are making hardly any use of the extra ram. Are chipset / ram manufactures being lazy and not trying to utilize this wasted space?
Hybrid drives would have made sense a year ago when SSD space cost more and the flooding in thailand hadn't caused a price spike in spinning drives. Now there's no reason not to just get a ssd that's big enough to hold your OS and all your apps and then add on a spinner if you need the extra space.
Again correct me if i am wrong, but RAM tries to be as efficient as possible, keeping as minimal as possible on it, only what is needed. It relies too much on the HDD/SSD for more ram to be useful. The bottleneck is happening on the HDD. Also booting up/ loading programs would take the same time, just in the application responses would be faster.