Momentus XT 750 GB Review: A Second-Gen Hybrid Hard Drive

Benchmark Results: Iometer 4 KB Random Read/Write And Application Test Patterns

Iometer 4 KB Random Read/Write

Although there are conditions under which the hybrid drives show better performance, we ran the test script for quite a while to make sure that the results reflect typical performance for true random operation.

We don't see significant performance gains here, but the new Momentus XT 750 GB is clearly faster than its predecessor.

Iometer Application Test Patterns

The three test patterns that emulate typical system (server) applications aren't any faster on the Momentus XT compared to other hard drives, since caching doesn't seem to help in the face of lots of random activity. In those workloads, you're as good or better off with other hard drive products. Better still, an SSD could give you up to 40x more performance.

Of course, these tests aren't representative of the desktop or notebook PC environments for which the Momentus XT was really designed. We wanted to run them anyway, though, to test for the effects of write caching.