Hi folks, I like to keep noise and heat to a minimum at all times since I have a ITX system. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive. It essentially uses 4GB of SSD NAND and combines it with a hard drive. Regularly used files are stored in the NAND, whilst everything else is stored in the traditional HD. I need more space for my Steam games, so was thinking of using it for this.
It's a great drive... but at the long term usage, they are reports of big problems, including data loss. Seagate is working on a firmware update.
I'm extremely sceptical that this drive offers real performance benefits over a standard mechanical drive. You should just save for an SSD, which are coming down in price all the time.
The whole package is far from the performance measured in the marketing department. The SSD part is too small and the whole hybrid is more glued together than anything else.
I agree with all the comments made here. Isn't constantly rewriting the SSD part going to kill it pretty quickly though?
SSD market proved as lucrative, especially for concepts. You try and you get hammered; the expense is of course yours.
Microsoft really need to work on getting some kind of 5-10gb SSD "chip" with the core window install files which can be put in a SATA port to slash boot time and add responsiveness. Laptops and OEM's could do a great job of marketing if they made it seem simple and accessible much like intel's turbo gimmick.
Well, it doesn't. It learns the files you constantly use (in my case, Steam files), and then stores them in the NAND. Anandtechs review was pretty positive, I just wanted to see if anyone else was using one and what they thought of it.
Both me and Mikey both use these drives as our main drives, we buy for CCL so have a good idea of what's available. I got my drive free of charge and it replaced a 160GB Intel Mainstream in my laptop and I consider it the best hard drive on the market. Not all drives suffer with the issues the drive has experienced and there are no more reports of problems than most SSD drives. Cracking bit of kit for use in laptops where value, power consumption, capacity and overall performance have to be taken into account.
I think they are a good idea for laptops, where you can only fit one drive in most cases, and a large capacity SSD is very expensive right now. For a desktop though, having a large HDD for data and then getting a small SSD for the boot drive is better. Its nearly £80 for the 250gb hybrid drive, a 250gb hard drive is less than £30. so you pay £50 for 4gb of SSD! £50 can get you a 32gb SSD...
Your spot on there. £89 will buy you a C300 64GB boot drive, or a 64GB Vertex 2. Then you will get a very dramatic and noticeable performance increase.
I already have a 128Gb C300 and a Hitachi 7200rpm 500Gb 2.5" for media etc, but I'm running out of space so I want to get another 2.5" drive (3.5" are too noisy and hot for my ITX rig). Just wondering whether it was worth the additional £40 or if I should go for another Hitachi drive as per above.
you've already got a SSD boot with space for your most used programs the point of this is it write your most common files onto a 4gb SSD drive for quicker loading and as those kind of file will already be on the 300 there no point
Hey guys, Am looking into an SSD both for new build and upgrade to an XP system and can't seem to find anyone testing RAIDed Momentus drives or RocketHybrid cards with small Kingston SSDs (say 8GB for £25) as cache and normal HDDs/Momentuses... Does anyone have any experience/input into this option? I'm aware of the lack of TRIM in XP, so wondered if a small Kingston and RH card would work or would have longer term issues. Apologies if this is the wrong thread but I've been trawling the forums for a couple of hours and couldn't find a more suitable one. Cheers, Squiddy
As an update to the above, have spent quite some time looking into these options now but seem to be going round in circles. It looks as if my options are to either get a Kingston V+100 (as according to anandtech these drives can TRIM themselves, albeit at quite an aggressive rate) or a Momentus. Does anybody agree with this?
Got two - one for XP, one for Win7. Until yesterday, I'd have fully recommended them - both XP and Win7 boot faster than I've had previously for clean installs. The 500GB versions I have also do a really nice job. I went with one for my XP isntall as the SSD is supposed to be a pure hardware implementation i.e. OS independent/TRIM supported at the drive firmware level, rather than needing an OS to do the job). Unfortuantely, I had 99% of my Games files on my XP wiped on Saturday (I install all my games files into c:\Games)- not sure if it's a drive fault, Windows problem or dodgy game install as yet but I can't rule the drive out as yet. Saying that, the Engadget article on the Momentus XT data loss issues specifically mentioned people installing them into Macs and linked to Apple forums - nothing about Windows - so it's possible that I'm just unlucky or have a dodgy game installer, rather than the drive being a problem. I'll add more if I find out what caused it.
I have A Momentus XT Hybrid in my laptop but I would not recommend it for a desktop as you have many bays so you could just get a SSD and a HDD. Do not know about the Rocket Hybrid option, if it actually works seems like a nifty idea for someone who has lots programs and files and cannot be arsed to always be moving them between the 2 drives manually (that person would be a lot like me) but I wouldn't risk it either, I might just wait for the SSD drives to get cheaper and stick to mechanical drives for the moment.
