Power Consumption Testing

too bad HDDs still cost the same as they do 2-3 years ago........

This is what everyone with a laptop should do to get more speed. Remove your useless (in most case) DVD drive and put your HDD in their and put a SSD in your HDD bay.

I've got raid 0 first gen momentus xt 500's in this box and I love it. Not to sure I can swallow the much higher price of the 750's however..

Thailand flood. It'll be a while until prices drop...

HDDs cost MORE than they did 2 years ago

4uck seagate - WD duopoly

You know that the problem is the Thailand flood right?

Alternatively if they put them in an eternal storage you could buy the drivers alot cheaper, managed to get 2TB Samsung drives for £59 inside an external device. I know I break the warranty on the device, but the 2TB SATA drive for £59 at the moment is excellent. Look out for USB external storage devices, they could be going cheap based on there USB performance compared to USB, but at the same time provide a nice alternative to getting storage.

They used this "problem" to make money. Look at their profit reports.
http://www.techpowerup.com/159766/ [...] sults.html

Nothing wrong with a company making money, it is how they stay in business, innovate, and keep people employed.

I have a 500GB XT and it is excellent ... well worth it for the price.

The 750GB XT model if it is priced around the same will sell like hotcakes.

I can't afford a large SSD so these seem the right fit for me in terms of price and performance.

They get my tick of approval.

Exceptionally well written article from the German team at toms ... well done guys !!

Not Impressive and not for me.

Other than boot and repeating the same thing over and over again this drive just is not fast enough.
Since I dont use laptops as my primary computers and have a server and two workstations my laptops dont need 500+GB of storage on them either.

Money is better spend on a ~120gb SSD for ~$130 that will give ten+ times the performance of this hybrid drive.

so is it ok if the customer gets raped ?

Then vote with your money and dont buy.

Good article and I agree with most of the points made. I have used both the 1st Gen 500 GB and am currently using the 750GB discussed in this article. Like browsers, people are now putting too much emphasis into benchmarks. This doesn't necessarily translate to real-world experience. I have a Lenovo W510 that is now about two years old. It came with a Hitachi 7200 rpm HDD. It wasn't slow, but it also wasn't fast. The laptop also only has one HDD bay. Apparently the Ultra Bay that you can purchase to stick a second drive in doesn't fit too well. Out of curiosity, I decided to try the 500 GB Momentus XT and was immediately and pleasantly surprised at the performance increase. I would've loved to have put an SSD instead, but to get a 500GB+ costs way too much. When the 750GB version came out, and I saw it on sale, I figured I'd get that and swap out my wife's 5400 rpm drive in her 4 year old laptop (she really only uses it for Internet) which was SLOW. The 750GB did show a little bit better performance over the 500GB but not much. Putting the 500GB in my wife's laptop, however, was like night and day. Boot times are incredibly faster, and overall system responsiveness is greatly improved. Yet, the Windows Index for Storage never changed. Therefore, I'm curious whether Tom's benchmarks can really be used to state how a user's experience will be with these drives. I would recommend this drive, however, as a relatively inexpensive upgrade in performance as well as storage space. Especially if you'd like to keep an older laptop running for a bit longer.

Their profits didn't come from raping the consumer. They came from liquidating their stocks rapidly as OEMs bought up all the drives they could anticipating that the supply would dry up rapidly, which it did. You make money when you sell huge amounts of your product that have been sitting in a warehouse.

I'm getting really, really sick of all these entitled brats whining about how a disaster that killed more than a thousand people and displaced millions more from their homes made their hard drives more expensive for a little while.

Get some perspective you twat.

I totally lost faith in Seagate drives. I won't touch any of them and never recommend them to anyone.

Neat idea but why such a small SS cache?

My 500GB died without notice. One minute it was working the next minute it was dead. The hard drive didn't even show up in the BIOS anymore. It was like it never existed. I removed it and put it back in and nothing. I tried many utilities on a CD that I booted up and none of them recognized that a hard drive existed. In my book that means the drive is dead.
I'm not sure if I have any recourse as I am the second owner of this computer.
I haven't yet gone to their site and see if the drive is under warranty.
Make sure if you own one you back up daily. Perhaps because of the flash involved there are no warning signs of a drive failing. Usually there are little noises or something that gives you a clue.
Good Luck.

Seriously? Back up a 500GB drive daily? Other than an IT admin, who the hell would back up a 500GB disk daily?

I would take a wait and see approach. The first gen hybrid drives were plagued with reliability problems. These seem like good tech, but I'm not buying one right away.