Anybody else waiting for the momentus xt 2nd gen

[Xpage]

Supposedly it was/is going to come out in Q4 2011, but with all the flooding in Thailand it may be delayed. Hopefully not, I'd like to get a replacement HDD with descent storage and some SLC on it to augment my SSD.


http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Moment...s/INFORMATION-About-Momentus-XT-2/td-p/114678


I am really hoping they make a 3.5" version and slap some more NAND on it. I think a 1TB drive with 24GB usable MLC memory (comes with 30GB 6GB redundant raid 5 across the nand chips maybe), would be worth a $40-$50 premium I think.

Of course that is if they have the BSOD issues ironed out with this generation.

 

[nanaki333]

as far as i'm concerned, the first one was a huge disappointment. the difference between a standard 2.5 is negligible. 16GB on the new ones seem like it would be much more useful though.

 

[corkyg]

I have 5 XT's (2.5-in) in two Lenovo laptops - anything but disapppointing. The main drives are 320GB and the Ultrabay data drive is 500GB. Just got it two weeks ago from the Egg. For a laptop and travel, they are excellent. They replaced WDC Scorpio Blacks and are noticeably faster, especially after a 4-5 day learning curve. BSOD? Never seen one on either T60 or T510.

 

[Concillian]

more interested in the Barracuda XT that was hinted at in the AT review of the 1TB platter Barracudas.

Don't do much on a laptop, 3.5" drives are more interesting, especially for the wife / kids machine, 70% of SSD performance at 50% the price + higher capacity is a good option.

They need to do some form of write caching though. Read only caching of the 1st gen is the main thing that prevented me from using the 1st gen in a desktop PC.

 

[greenhawk]

I think a 1TB drive with 24GB usable MLC memory (comes with 30GB 6GB redundant raid 5 across the nand chips maybe), would be worth a $40-$50 premium I think.

well if they are listing the SSD at 16GB, then 24 is not going to happen. Look at the originals, they started at 4GB and never changed the size of it.

As to the premium, the laptop drives, for that 4GB, IIRC, was about a 50% price increase over similar speced drives from competitors. $50 is not going to happen if Seagate stick to the same formular.

I would be beting the price will be compariable to bing a 30GB SSD and a Z68 board to use it on. But then you are still only getting 16GB.

Though the 10K looks interesting to go with my SSD, V'Raptor and WD Black.

 

[nanaki333]

I have 5 XT's (2.5-in) in two Lenovo laptops - anything but disapppointing. The main drives are 320GB and the Ultrabay data drive is 500GB. Just got it two weeks ago from the Egg. For a laptop and travel, they are excellent. They replaced WDC Scorpio Blacks and are noticeably faster, especially after a 4-5 day learning curve. BSOD? Never seen one on either T60 or T510.

meh... i got them back when they came out and 1 died (constant bsod no matter what laptop i put it in) but the other one didn't seem much faster than a mechanical. it was a tad faster but nothing to write home about. now i'm just spoiled by SSDs as every laptop/desktop i have has at least 1. i think i still have my old XT somewhere.

 

[Blain]

Balancing price, capacity and performance the Momentus XT's aren't bad.

 

[Silenus]

My thoughts are that unless they add write caching also (its a read cache only right now) I probably won't be interested. With the addition of write cache I think it could be a nice alternative to ssd in laptop.

Sent from my ADR6400L using Tapatalk

 

[nanaki333]

a much larger cache is definitely going to be welcome. the price for the original XT wasn't that bad, so i guess for the price it is good. if the new ones have 20GB cache for about the same price, i can definitely see myself getting some for business laptops.

 

[Emulex]

if they had supercapacitor and maybe 4-16GB of flash per drive for write-back with 2,3, or 4TB in enterprise (TLER/CER) format then i'd be all about it.

 

[KeithP]

Next gen has been tested...

http://blog.laptopmag.com/seagate-2...-hard-drive-provides-750gb-at-near-ssd-speeds

-KeithP

 

[allthatisman]

Next gen has been tested...

http://blog.laptopmag.com/seagate-2...-hard-drive-provides-750gb-at-near-ssd-speeds

-KeithP

Hail to another Sacramento native!

I had a couple of the old XT's and never saw the improvement that most claim to see... sure the drives would sometimes show some SSD pep, but it was never consistent. Given that most of the reviews I have read today for the new drive, show them running a program 3-6 times to get the best results, it still seems like the drives could be doing better... I say that because of the reviews I've read on the OCZ Synapse and Intel's SRT... neither of which are an option for me on my G73 Laptop. Plus, at almost $240, that is approaching the larger capacity SSD prices... right now I am running a 128gb WD SSD(closing in on 2 years old now), which is very average in the speed dept, but has been very reliable.

 

[corkyg]

Next gen has been tested... http://blog.laptopmag.com/seagate-2...-hard-drive-provides-750gb-at-near-ssd-speeds-KeithP

Interesting article - but credibility is questionable because of this sentence . . . "Last year, Seagate threw the storage world a curve when it released the original Momentus XT, a 7,200-rpm 250 or 500GB hard drive with the ability to cache your most commonly used files on its 4GB of Flash . . ."

The original XT sizes were 320GB and 500GB. 250GBG was never part of the commercial offering.

 

[Concillian]

Hail to another Sacramento native!

I had a couple of the old XT's and never saw the improvement that most claim to see... sure the drives would sometimes show some SSD pep, but it was never consistent. Given that most of the reviews I have read today for the new drive, show them running a program 3-6 times to get the best results, it still seems like the drives could be doing better... I say that because of the reviews I've read on the OCZ Synapse and Intel's SRT... neither of which are an option for me on my G73 Laptop. Plus, at almost $240, that is approaching the larger capacity SSD prices... right now I am running a 128gb WD SSD(closing in on 2 years old now), which is very average in the speed dept, but has been very reliable.

None of the reviews I've read mention anything about using the SSD to cache writes... They also don't explicitly say it doesn't cache writes, but I think it'd be mentioned if it was a new feature. This is going to result in 'meh' performance.

I can emulate SSD performance in my normal workload by running a 10GB (RAM) fancycache with delayed write enabled. 10GB makes a big difference, but if I turn off delayed writes, it's really not much better than normal windows caching. This means the only real benefit a read only SSD cache has is boot time and the first launch before it gets in the RAM cache. Though most people don't have 10 GB of spare RAM space...

I'm leaning towards the "OCZ synapse style of caching" as superior, though not possible on a 1 drive notebook. I think I'll probably have to find a cheap 64GB drive to use as a cache drive with fancycache for my wife's machine to really add the snap. Fancycache will start costing money for a license soon, so it will likely end up similar in price to a synapse drive, but more flexible in the long run.

 

[greenhawk]

Next gen has been tested...

http://blog.laptopmag.com/seagate-2...-hard-drive-provides-750gb-at-near-ssd-speeds

-KeithP

well, that tells me the more important detail I wanted to know about the device. They upped the flash drive size from 4GB, to 8GB.

pass.

 

[KeithP]

Storage Review has tested it now as well...

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_750gb_review

-KeithP

 

[Concillian]

Storage Review has tested it now as well...

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_750gb_review

-KeithP

Cool:

And to be fair, Seagate has committed to improving the drive over time, they've already announced plans for a firmware update to enable FAST Write, to give writes to the drive some caching advantage.

...Just got more interesting (once the price comes down to earth and the new firmware is ready)

 

[allthatisman]

Storage Review has tested it now as well...

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_750gb_review

-KeithP

Storage review has some of the worst testing I've ever seen. Their graphs are also really hard to read, it's all synthetic benchmarks with too many similar drive combinations, and no "real world" tests like windows start time, Crysis level load, etc. Most people, want their machine to be more "snappy" and for things to load faster, i.e. perceptual tests that ANY user will be able to notice a difference with. For example, level loading in Skyrim I can never read the text on the load screens because it loads too fast on my SSD, but on any HDD, there is ample time to read those screens... that is the sort of thing that I want to see. Synthetic benchmarks were cool when SSD's first came out because they showed the glaring difference between even a "slow" SSD and even the fastest Velociraptor etc. But now, even a slower SSD compared to something like a Vertex 3... the average user would be hard pressed to notice much, if any, difference between the two in day to day usage.

Edit: to the point though, the new and old XT somewhat fit in between a faster HDD and a slow SSD, but the performance (IMO) has always been sketchy and all over the place.