Seagate Momentus XT 500gb 4gb SSD hybrid $90 Newegg

[thedarkwolf]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148591
Not flaming hot but not bad either. I was on the fence about getting one of these or a pure SSD but was afraid of space issues so I caved and bought one of these. Should still be way faster than my 5400rpm laptop drive and it is cheaper than a regular 500gb 7200rpm drive.

 

[Macgyversite]

They are just that. Faster than but slower than. A good compromise.

 

[Alienwho]

I actually use this in my desktop at home. I really like it. I have a SSD in my work desktop and my home desktop with this drive doesn't feel any slower. Loads battlefield 3 levels very quickly and skyrim loads almost instantly. I have it paired up with an i7 and 12GB ram.

 

[NTAC]

I actually use this in my desktop at home. I really like it. I have a SSD in my work desktop and my home desktop with this drive doesn't feel any slower. Loads battlefield 3 levels very quickly and skyrim loads almost instantly. I have it paired up with an i7 and 12GB ram.

So does this fit in the floppy drive cage of your case on your desktop? I'd be buying it for my desktop as well so I'm wondering if I need anything extra or if there will just be a spot in my case to screw it in to.

 

[Vincent]

So does this fit in the floppy drive cage of your case on your desktop? I'd be buying it for my desktop as well so I'm wondering if I need anything extra or if there will just be a spot in my case to screw it in to.

You will most likely need a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter.

I think this drive doesn't really make a lot of sense for a desktop. You might as well spend a bit more to get an SSD to use as a boot drive. Then use a traditional hard drive as mass storage.

For a laptop this drive makes perfect sense because you typically only have one drive bay and this hybrid drive provides both high performance and large capacity.

 

[NTAC]

You will most likely need a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter.

I think this drive doesn't really make a lot of sense for a desktop. You might as well spend a bit more to get an SSD to use as a boot drive. Then use a traditional hard drive as mass storage.

For a laptop this drive makes perfect sense because you typically only have one drive bay and this hybrid drive provides both high performance and large capacity.

Hmm... I like the 500 GB of storage though, the other normal SSD drives are far too small...

With this drive it sounds like I get quicker boot times and load times for things I use most often, yet still get a nice storage amount with 500 GBs.

When you say I would need an adapter, do you mean a cable adapter or some type of case adapter to make it fit somewhere?

 

[Vincent]

You will need a case adapter like this:

http://www.amazon.com/SILVERSTONE-SD.../dp/B002BH3Z8E

 

[NTAC]

Thanks!!

 

[SunRey]

Thank You!

 

[boomhower]

I bought one. I am running out of room on my 60GB SSD in my notebook. I'm not liking the prices of higher capacity SSD's so I took this as a compromise. It should be here in the next day or two so we'll see how it turns out. The price is pretty hot, I haven't seen it south of $130 in quite a while.

 

[Rvenger]

This would be good for the P67 motherboard owners that are unable to use the SSD caching feature.

 

[Glendor]

I bought one. I am running out of room on my 60GB SSD in my notebook. I'm not liking the prices of higher capacity SSD's so I took this as a compromise. It should be here in the next day or two so we'll see how it turns out. The price is pretty hot, I haven't seen it south of $130 in quite a while.

I have two of these in RAID0 in my main rig. SSD would have been quicker, but at the time the money would have put me way overbudget. This is a nice middleground between platters and SSD drives.

 

[NTAC]

So does the 4GB of SSD make that much of a difference? To me it sounds like 4 GBs isn't that big, but maybe I'm not understanding how it all works. I mean, I play a lot of BF3, would this actually load BF3 faster or is BF3 just too big to really get any benefit from the SSD partition?

 

[dajeepster]

thanks OP... just ordered one.. decided not to buy this a few days ago.. glad i waited

 

[LagunaX]

It is a very nice drive - I had one in my toshiba laptop then switched to a real ssd.
In retrospec there was no real noticeable difference on my laptop between the two.

 

[zposter]

It is a very nice drive - I had one in my toshiba laptop then switched to a real ssd.
In retrospec there was no real noticeable difference on my laptop between the two.

I did the same and found the SSD was much faster, particularly after logging in. The notebook used to chug for a while before I could do anything with the Momentus XT. Now it's all ready to work with after logging in.

It may very much depend on the CPU in the laptop, I've found even a SSD doesn't help low-end CPUs much. My notebook has a i5 and the SSD noticeably helps, but the SSD has only 1/2 the storage so that's also a consideration.

 

[jaydee]

Wonder if this has anything to do with the warranty slashing? Isn't the hybrid drives down from 5 to 3 years?

 

[Wag]

This would be good for the P67 motherboard owners that are unable to use the SSD caching feature.

That's how I use it. It's plenty fast.

 

[kmmatney]

I think this drive doesn't really make a lot of sense for a desktop. You might as well spend a bit more to get an SSD to use as a boot drive. Then use a traditional hard drive as mass storage.

Well, that's what I thought, but I have a few desktops at home with different configurations, and I have to say this works quite well in a desktop. My personal rig has an 80GB SSD and a 1 TB hard drive. I'm always waiting for the HD to spin up, and its pretty annoying. The system with the XT seems to to never lag the same way, and is in some cases nicer to use. If you don't need over 500 GB of space, I can say that this drive works very well in a desktop.

 

[qliveur]

^This might be a dumb question, but do you have "turn off hard disk" set to "never" under advanced power settings? My platter HDD would lag while it was spinning up until I changed that setting to "never".

 

[boomhower]

After using it for a little while I am satisfied with it. It is a touch slower at boot and launching some applications but overall it's not bad. Certainly faster than a regular mechanical drive and I got the storage space I desperately needed. I'd buy again.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I just swapped out an Intel X-25M G2 80GB SSD for a Momentus XT 500GB. FWIW:

Boot to useable desktop: SSD : 33 seconds vs. XT: 46 seconds
Shut down: SSD : 6 seconds vs. XT: 10 seconds
Open a 200MB PPT file: SSD : 4 seconds vs. XT: 11 seconds

So, the XT is noticeably slower than the SSD was. However, it's a helluva lot faster than a 7200rpm 2.5" HDD. IMHO it's a good compromise between SSD speed and HDD capacity.

Perhaps most importantly, battery life does not appear to have changed at all.

 

[Roland00Address]

So does the 4GB of SSD make that much of a difference? To me it sounds like 4 GBs isn't that big, but maybe I'm not understanding how it all works. I mean, I play a lot of BF3, would this actually load BF3 faster or is BF3 just too big to really get any benefit from the SSD partition?

4GB is a lot of space if the space is used in a smart dyanmic fashion.

A fresh windows 7 install is approximately 6 GB for 32bit and about 8 GB for 64bit. When I say fresh I am not counting the page file, hibernation, system restore, or any updates. The files you are going to access a lot on a computer are going to be a fraction of those 8 GBs so having 4 of them on SSD helps out tremendously on speed. (Now if you use Battlefield 3 files more often than those windows files the hybrid drive will automatically reallocate the space.) SSDs are over a magnitude faster than any hard drive in the order of latency.

Getting a 4 GB smart ssd like a hybrid drive definately improves speed (when I say smart I am saying a drive that automatically determines what to cache). That said getting a 40 GB or bigger "dumb" SSD is even more benefical since you can have everything available for fast writes and reads (with very little latency).

-----------------------------------

You should never go less than 40 GB on a dumb ssd with windows 7 and here is why.

A fresh Windows 7 64bit takes up about 8 GB. That said Windows Updates stores a lot of files in a dumping place called the WinSys folder NEVER EVER delete this folder for it will cause problems if your software wants to update itself or if you want to remove something. So while windows 7 may only take 8 gbs, all your updates you ever download is going to stay put in your winsys folder. The WinSys folder can get huge, I am talking like 10 to 15 GB by itself (my current winsys is 11.6 GB).

You should never disable your pagefile (though it is safe to make it something like 1 to 4 GB). Windows normally makes your page file double the size of ram.

If you do not disable hibernate, that is going to take up even more space.

Start adding things like program files and you got another 6 to 12 GB (when I say program files I am not including games, if you have big program files like photoshop you may want to figure out how much space these take by itself and add that to the 40 number.)

8 (64bit win7 )+15 (winsys)+4 (pagefile)+10ish (programs) is about 37 GB. If you make the page file 1 GB then you are about 36 GB or so. Giving you the number that is within 10% of 40 GB.

My 40GB Intel-V has been running great on my htpc (which is 64bit not 32bit). I have also run a 64GB indinnix drive (desktop), a 128 Sandforce (1st gen SSD) in my netbook, and I am currently replacing my current desktop with a newer better one and it has a 120gb Intel 310. I haven't yet had to "prune" my Intel-V drive, but if it was a 32GB I would have filled it up completely a long time ago.

 

[zposter]

You should never disable your pagefile (though it is safe to make it something like 1 to 4 GB).

Why?

 

[kmmatney]

^This might be a dumb question, but do you have "turn off hard disk" set to "never" under advanced power settings? My platter HDD would lag while it was spinning up until I changed that setting to "never".

I'm using the "Performance" setting in Windows 7, but it does spin down the hard disks after 20 minutes. I'm not sure I want to hard disks to be spinning constantly (especially since its a WD Green drive), but maybe turning off after 2 hours or so would be a compromise.

The Momentus XT seems to spin up much faster, so you get a nice overall experience, while not having to keep the disk spinning. It's really not a bad desktop HDD.