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Seagate momentus XT SSD and HDD in one

0

0ct0

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 24, 2010
7
0
netherlands
first off let me say hi everyone,

Been on these forums browsing around snooping info for a while now. I'm in the market for a 2010 MBP and i am really looking into the SSD's. The downside is there price and the relative small storage space.

But now i read some post on a tech website about the seagate momentus XT
Which is a 500Gb HDD @ 7200 RPM with a 4GB flash memory. Now i'm intrested to see what you guys think of this concept would it be a good deal to get this into a MBP or just stick with the 500Gb apple HDD till the price on SSD's drop.

PS: would it be possible to fit 2 of these inside a MBP??
 
To be honest, I stopped buying Seagate drives ever since the Barracuda series started going on a wild failing rampage sometime back. My neighbor had a Seagate drive in his external enclosure and I saw it fail with my very eyes. I'm a photojournalist and find it hard to sleep at night relying on something like that. :)

I've moved onto SSDs but fear not, there are plenty of fast HDDs out there - Western Digital, Samsung are the top brands to name. You need a 2.5" drive for your MBP. Yes, you can fit an extra drive in in the place of the DVD drive. For that you need a drive caddy - I suggest newmodeUS since Optibay is extremely overpriced.
 
well what i was aiming for with the comment if 2 drives would fit is the fact that (dunno if this is even possible) but a raid setup would give you near SSD performance from the reviews i've seen.

For around 300 dollars and 1TB of storage. I mean that would be insane

if possible offcourse
 
This looks great for laptops, but why stop there?

Why not put, say 16gig of flash into a 3.5" hybrid drive of, say, 500mb-1.5tb -- and then slip that drive into an iMac?

It probably wouldn't cost too much (given the 3.5" form factor), yet the performance boost on the iMac platform would be impressive, to say the least. It would give the iMac a breathtaking speed boost to the end user without a big outlay of cost-per-unit or r&d….
 
0ct0 : no hard drive in the world can give you anything close to the performance of an SSD. They just don't compare. That's the sole reason why 1TB HDD space costs $300 and 100GB SSD space costs $400.
 
Well i'm not looking for the exact same performance cause i know SSD are the fastest thing out there.
just looking for a decent alternative and a raid setup of these puppys would give a significant performance boost with less cost and more disk space.
 
0ct0 said:
well what i was aiming for with the comment if 2 drives would fit is the fact that (dunno if this is even possible) but a raid setup would give you near SSD performance from the reviews i've seen.

For around 300 dollars and 1TB of storage. I mean that would be insane

if possible offcourse
Click to expand...

Or you could just do 1TB + SSD and get actual SSD performance and much better battery life (and still not spend to much more)
 
From Seagate:

"On Wednesday, May 26, at 11 a.m. PST, Seagate and OEM customer ASUS will co-sponsor a live webcast unveiling not only the new Seagate Solid State Hybrid drive, Momentus XT, but also featuring the new ASUS ROG G73JH system with two Momentus XT drives. Three lucky attendees of this webcast will win a new G73 system just for attending."

Read more: http://hothardware.com/Articles/Sea...d-State-Hybrid-Preview/?page=10#ixzz0orL1HWqV

Apparently, the first system with this drive will have two installed - it will be interesting to see the benchmarks. I wish there was a program for the Mac that would function like the firmware algorithm in this drive; i.e., would make an SSD and traditional HD appear as one drive, continuously duplicating the most-used files to the SSD.
 
Can't wait for my X25-M to come and do the Optibay, so i can upgrade the HDD in case I find it not to my needs.

But this XT is a good bargain!
 
i saw this on engadget today, looks awesome. i'm assuming it's not for sale yet? i'm definitely thinking about getting one to replace the 5400rpm drive in my mbp.
 
The impression that I get is that this type of thing has a lot of potential, but Seagate's implementation is somewhat primitive. Future drives could do better with more than 4GB of flash, better algorithms, and by caching writes as well as reads.

There's also the chance, as the technology is unproven, of unforseen problems down the road. HDDs are extremely complex devices.

Still, at that price I'm quite tempted. Anyone know if any competitors have plans for their own hybrid drives?
 
Jacquesass said:
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_500gb/

...and someone has already benchmarked the drives in RAID0. Equals or beats an SSD in some tests.
Click to expand...

Are you reading the same link as me? Cause in all the tests the SSD (even though the guy is using old models of SSD to test against for whatever reason), the SSD wins.

And keep in mind for most users who don't access the same data (ie web pages, documents, etc) all the time this drive will do nothing. It'd actually be a good idea for an ipod with a massive capacity, since most people have their music collection then they have a small number of songs that they listen to as favorites, I could see that as an application for this thing.

I guess it's 1/4 the price of SSD so if it gets half the performance increase it's a good upgrade dollar for dollar...
 
qaz2 said:
The impression that I get is that this type of thing has a lot of potential, but Seagate's implementation is somewhat primitive. Future drives could do better with more than 4GB of flash, better algorithms, and by caching writes as well as reads.

There's also the chance, as the technology is unproven, of unforseen problems down the road. HDDs are extremely complex devices.

Still, at that price I'm quite tempted. Anyone know if any competitors have plans for their own hybrid drives?
Click to expand...


Seems like the interaction between the HDD, the SSD, and 2 drive controllers having talk to each other might be issue-prone... I wouldn't trust a Rev A, Gen 1 of this thing with my data. :) When one comes out with a new technology they all do anyhow.
 
bella92108 said:
Are you reading the same link as me? Cause in all the tests the SSD (even though the guy is using old models of SSD to test against for whatever reason), the SSD wins.

And keep in mind for most users who don't access the same data (ie web pages, documents, etc) all the time this drive will do nothing. It'd actually be a good idea for an ipod with a massive capacity, since most people have their music collection then they have a small number of songs that they listen to as favorites, I could see that as an application for this thing.

I guess it's 1/4 the price of SSD so if it gets half the performance increase it's a good upgrade dollar for dollar...
Click to expand...

It is faster in some tests than a "cheap" SSD.

This adds about $50 to the price of a regular hard drive, as of today, launch date.

SSDs cost about 20 times the price of a hard drive of the same size.
 
cube said:
It is faster in some tests than a "cheap" SSD.

This adds about $50 to the price of a regular hard drive, as of today, launch date.

SSDs cost about 20 times the price of a hard drive of the same size.
Click to expand...

20 times? Where you shopping, the Apple Store? LOL... jk, but seriously, a HD vs SSD is about 10x price increase right now, true it is a luxury, but so is the Mac brand in general (despite their ads). But (to me) well worth it for battery gain (which the new Seagate drives will actually worsen performance vs traditional drives - see benchmarks for power consumption), reliability (i don't have spinning metal plates and hair-sized readers inside my laptop) and the additional benefits of SSD... but this is a silly argument, it's like "chicken vs lobster" ... if you can't afford lobster you buy the tastiest chicken you can and do whatever you can to make your chicken taste better than the competitors'. :)
 
The price difference widens as capacity increases:

$40-60 for 160GB HDD vs ~$450 for 160GB Intel X-25M G2
$50-70 for 500GB HDD vs $1599 for 480GB OWC SSD
 
cyclical said:
The price difference increases with capacity:

$40-60 for 160GB HDD vs $450 for 160GB Intel X-25M G2
$50-70 for 500GB HDD vs $1599 for 480GB OWC SSD
Click to expand...

Untrue, the only case is in the 500 and 512 gb capacities. Just like any hard drive, there's a point where the technology is mainstream, and the cap right now on SSD is about 256gb... then above that there's the "early adopter premium" ... It's proportionately about 5-10x the cost at the sub 256 range then goes up from there. Just like in 2008 2GB of RAM was $200, 4GB was $400 and 8GB was $2000.... now the 8GB has become more mainstream so it's about $100\$200\$300.
 
Yes, because such small hard drives are suboptimal.

At 250GB, which would still be economical for single platter, the difference is "only" 15 times.
 
bella92108 said:
Are you reading the same link as me? Cause in all the tests the SSD (even though the guy is using old models of SSD to test against for whatever reason), the SSD wins.
Click to expand...

Gosh, maybe we aren't reading the same article. In regards to the OP's question about running two XT's as a RAID0:

"In CDM, the trend continues with the Momentus XT being faster then the standard HDD and at times reaching into the SSD realm, especially when in RAID configuration, where it had the highest 512KB write speed and very close sequential read and write speeds to the SSD's. "
 
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