Seagate Momentus XT 750GB SATA III Hybrid Disk Drive Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: RWL Staff Article Publish Date: 1/13/2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

    As we speak at the other side of the Atlantic the largest International Consumer Electronics Show (also known as CES) is starting to close its doors after 3 days of countless presentations of just about every technological product out there from PC components, to vacuum cleaners, LCD/Plasma/3D Screens, Players and much more. Now although i do really wish i could be there i am not complaining since I’ve been also working on some of the products seen there and as clearly stated on the review tag one of those is the latest hybrid (HDD+SSD) solution by Seagate, the 2nd Generation Momentus XT 2.5" 750GB SATA III drive.

 

 

    Founded in 1979, Seagate is the leading provider of storage devices–in 2008, we became the first hard drive manufacturer to ship 1 billion hard drives–with the industry’s broadest product offering. Our products include 2.5–inch and 3.5–inch hard disk drives, solid state drives and hybrid drives (which incorporate both rotating media and flash memory) for compute–intensive enterprise environments that demand high performance, low–power consumption and proven reliability. In 2009, Seagate developed its first solid–state drives (SSDs) that leverage non–volatile flash memory instead of spinning magnetic media. Seagate’s first SSDs were designed for enterprise environments utilizing blade and general server applications. We followed that up in 2010 with a solid state hybrid drive for laptops–a product with a unique algorithm that enables the drive to “learn” which files are needed most often and then places them in the drive’s on–board flash memory for lightning–fast access. Seagate’s products enable high–performance desktop and laptop systems, along with ultraportable devices such as netbooks and thin laptops. We delivered the industry’s first 2TB, 7,200–RPM desktop hard drive, along with the world’s first 7mm, 2.5–inch form factor drive. These innovative storage products deliver super–sized capacities, industry–leading performance, encrypted security features and more.

 

 

    Just over a year ago Seagate introduced their 1st Generation Momentus XT 500GB SATA II hybrid drive which was basically the marriage of a 7200RPM 500GB HDD with 4GB of SLC NAND Flash. So exactly like other hybrid solutions the most frequent used data were moved to the 4GB NAND Flash part of the drive while the least used data remained on the normal HDD. Fast forward a year later and Seagate just released the 2nd Generation of the Momentus XT drive, this time however the drive supports the SATA III protocol, the main HDD comes with 750GB of space and the SLC NAND Flash part has been doubled to a total of 8GB compared to the 4GB of the previous generation. What do all these translate as when it comes to performance compared to other similar solutions? Well we are also quite curious about that so read on to find out.