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Performance

Has the Hybrid Drive Era Arrived?
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Fortunately, the amount of memory present in the system had almost no impact on results, so we feel safe in focusing only on 4 GB configs. Similarly, the impact of CPU family was minimal, so we’ll aim in the middle and call out the Core i5 results.

Above, we see the overall storage scores for our four drives. Not surprisingly, Intel’s Series 320 120 GB SSD tops the rankings at 4456. Seagate’s Momentus XT 750 GB pulls in right behind at 3838. The 7200 RPM Barracuda 1 TB sees a sharp drop down to 2128 (mind you, this is a 3.5” drive, not a 2.5” like the prior two), and the WD’s low spin rate drive trails in with 1769.

A few points are worth highlighting here. First, there’s an 80% performance difference between the Barracuda and the Momentus XT, so for those who wonder what sort of boost they can get from a hybrid’s integrated NAND, here’s one piece of the answer. Second, Intel’s SSD shows a 19% performance advantage over the Momentus XT, and Intel’s $180 street price means about a 16% premium over the Momentus XT. This seems like a fair step up until one remembers that Intel’s drive offers a 120 GB capacity compared to Seagate’s 750 GB. For $30 more, Intel buyers are getting over 6X less capacity in trade for only 19% more performance.

 If we dig into the specific PC Mark 7 test results, the numbers get even more interesting. Multimedia processing-related tests show very little difference regardless of drive. The flash in Seagate’s hybrid lifts its Windows Defender numbers nearly on par with Intel’s straight up SSD; the same effect is seen almost as markedly in gaming. No doubt, the 320 SSD destroys the field on startup time, but consider that the Momentus XT is turning startup scores over 5X faster than the Barracuda. The overall scores don’t reflect this, and, for many users, this sort of startup acceleration alone is worth the $45 extra for a hybrid.

Seagate ran a second set of tests specifically looking at boot and application launching across four different drives: three in an HP Core i5-based notebook and one in the MacBook Air. As you can see in the above breakdown, the MacBook Air easily wins on OS boot time, but it loses ground once applications start to load. By the end, the MacBook Air config places third out of the four. The key comparison here is between the Momentus XT and the 5400 RPM drive, which is still a very common component in mainstream notebooks. Whereas the synthetic “Start Apps” test in PCMark 7 showed an almost unbelievable gap between the 5400 RPM Caviar Green and the Momentus XT, this startup set shows real world results: a 78% faster launch for the Momentus XT than the 5400 RPM competitor.