Seagate Momentus XT Review

Nick Zircher (@NZircher) is one of my co-workers at SMS Protech, recently he purchased one of Seagate’s new hybrid drives, so I’m sharing his experience so far… as he didn’t want to take the time to sign-up as a blogger on my site.

I recently purchased an SSD hybrid (4GB of SSD, 500GB of platters) for my notebook.

It has made a huge difference.  I hated using the notebook because of performance issues.  They are now gone.

The original hard drive was a 160GB 5400RPM.

The new one is this:  500GB

This new drive is completely OS agnostic.  Gives you the space and price of a spinning disk, while some of the read speed of SSD.

The SSD is used only as a cache mechanism.  It does not improve writes at all.

I ran two benchmarks to also compare the drives.  It is in the attached spreadsheet.  I only ran the test once for the SSD drive because it starts to cache after that.  The test for the other drive is the best of the three.

Bottom Line:

This is the differences it made just on my boot and shut down time:

500GB SSD Hybrid:  Start: 92 sec, Shutdown: 18 sec

160GB Platter:  Start: 186 sec, Shutdown:  25 sec

That is a huge difference.

Just sharing……

Nick Zircher

P.S.  Some specs about my notebook for reference

System
Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard Model HP Compaq 8510p Total amount of system memory 4.00 GB RAM System type 64-bit operating system Number of processor cores 2

Storage
Total size of hard disk(s) 465 GB Disk partition (C:) 401 GB Free (465 GB Total) Media drive (D:) CD/DVD

HDTune Pro Statistics:

Original drive:

HD Tune Pro: ST9160821AS Benchmark
Test capacity: full
Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 1.9 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 43.3 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 30.0 MB/s
Access Time           : 16.8 ms
Burst Rate            : 101.4 MB/s
CPU Usage             : 6.3%
HD Tune Pro: ST9160821AS Random Access
Test capacity: full
Read test
Transfer size	operations / sec	avg. access time	avg. speed
512 bytes	60 IOPS	16 ms	0.030 MB/s
4 KB	54 IOPS	18 ms	0.215 MB/s
64 KB	48 IOPS	20 ms	3.040 MB/s
1 MB	21 IOPS	46 ms	21.361 MB/s
Random	31 IOPS	31 ms	15.931 MB/s

Hybrid Drive:

HD Tune Pro: ST95005620AS Benchmark
Test capacity: full
Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 43.5 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 105.2 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 79.9 MB/s
Access Time           : 17.3 ms
Burst Rate            : 147.7 MB/s
CPU Usage             : 10.2%
HD Tune Pro: ST95005620AS Random Access
Test capacity: full
Read test
Transfer size	operations / sec	avg. access time	avg. speed
512 bytes	274 IOPS	3.6 ms	.134 MB/s
4 KB	55 IOPS	18 ms	0.216 MB/s
64 KB	54 IOPS	18 ms	3.420 MB/s
1 MB	31 IOPS	31 ms	31.695 MB/s
Random	37 IOPS	26 ms	18.813 MB/s