Seagate’s newly upgraded Momentus XT drive now sports 750GB of storage and 70 per cent faster performance. The drive claims boot-up and application launch speeds comparable to full SSD’s despite only having 8GB of solid-state storage for only $US245.
Released last year, the first-generation Momentus drive promised PC users what sounded like a miracle: they could have the blazing-fast performance of SSDs at a fraction of the cost and without the reliability problems of solid state storage. Solid state drives are fast, but unfortunately their storage cells wear out faster than the storage on hard drives. SSDs are also far more expensive than HDDs.
Seagate’s solution to this problem was to make a solid state “hybrid” drive which actually means that a bulk of the drive’s capacity is a good old-fashioned hard drive. The key is Seagate’s “Adaptive Memory” technology which learns a your behaviour and stores the most used files in the solid state portion of the drive to take advantage of the faster performance for the stuff you actually use the most often, and stores everything else on the lower-priority hard drive. The technology is so good that it minimises the number of times that you write to the solid state storage and thereby increase its lifespan — Seagate even guarantees the drive for five years.
The newest Momentus iteration sports larger 750GB capcity — compared the prior 500GB max — and twice as much flash storage. The new Momentus XT also carries some new technologies to help the drive learn your behaviour faster and a special storage location for your machine’s boot files—Seagate promises boot times three times faster than an HDD. The second-generation Momentus XT is shipping now, and is available from major retailers. [Seagate]
Biderjum
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 11:02 AMhmm, could use one of these in my new MBP
should speed things up a little bit more…
olearymo
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 12:52 PMfrom the way things are going with Apple’s stuff I think it’s more likely a new MBP will have SSDs as standard, with optional conventional HDDs. They won’t go for this kinda ‘inbetween’ tech.
Biderjum
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:57 PMAgreed, the next MBP should have dual drive options without an optical drive, but for right now, this will be good
Nicholas
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 11:10 AMA search on staticice prices this new one at ~320-350 bucks (750gb). Still seems like a pretty hefty investment :o
Biderjum
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 12:24 PMWhen you drop around 3k on a new MBP, whats another ~$300 to make it even better?
Just ordered, delivered for $348 from http://www.scorptec.com.au/
James
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 11:51 AMI have one of the 500gb 1st gens and all I can say is that for 120 bucks it’s been absolutely brilliant, and a lot faster than my old 7200 rpm drive as well.
DarthDVD
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:04 PMBRING ON THE 4TB Hybred Hard Drive!
I’ll be using it as a media drive (got a SSD for programs and the Os)
jeremy
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:37 PMsorry, you explaination makes no sense. If frequently accessed files are in flash, how does that make the flash last longer (since they are potentially getting written lots)? I suspect the optimisation actually looks for files that are read often but NOT written frequently, for example blocks containing shared libraries vs blocks containing swap. The real advatage here is that this is a form of n-tier storage – fast expensive drives that auto map to slow cheap storage in a way that is transparent.
Adam
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 2:49 AMI really want to get an SSD, and this seems tempting.
However, a 120gb SSD will cost me around $250, and a further 1tb HDD would cost around $70 when prices come back down.
That would give me 1.2tb of storage for $320, with 120gb of my data being saved on SSD, as opposed to 8gb.
What I really wonder is if the Momentus drives are much different from iSRT mode?