@Xombie11, not disagreeing with you at all, just want to clear it up with other people who might not know.
Advantages
1) I already stated that, I agree, 150$ for 500GB compared to $800+ for pure SSD, it’s a much better solution.
2) SSD has a near constant sub-one latency (.02-.5ms) compared to HDD (16ms for Momentus). This is the sole reason for the “snappiness” feel of SSDs. So while SSD may be slow, the snapiness will be more HDD like for Momentus.
3-4) As a alternative to both SSD/HD w. Optibay, that does make a nice alternative, but not as a sole alternative to SSD only.
5) Why would you have to worry about TRIM/IGC? It’s done in the background, nobody really notice it. Good SSDs with IGC don’t need TRIM, it’s bonus for people who use TRIM-ready OS. The Momentus only has 4GB of Flash and only used as reading cache. It doesn’t benefit for write operations, so for users who write data a lot, it isn’t going to be faster than any 7200rpm drive. Only benefit to people who often does the same thing all the time, and this is probably most of the general population and in this case, it’s a perfect compromise. There are no cons of getting Momentus XT except for the higher price than the typical 7200RPM 2.5” drives.
6) Agreed but if people are simply using this as storage drives instead of boot drives, it’s not any better than 5400rpm drives.
7) If people don’t need the slight increase in speed or bigger storage, it’s not a reason to get this now either. Just save the money regardless. The next gen won’t have 300-600GB less than 300$ either. It’ll most likely place Intel X-25M G3 300GB at 400$ and 600GB at around 800-900$.
Disadvantages
1) Why is this a disadvantage? It’s only a con for people thinking of getting an SSD. For people thinking of getting a faster HDD, it’s a pro.
2) Once again, for people who wasn’t going to get an optibay drive, it’s not a con but it is a con for people who got the money ready to burn.
3) Not really a con, it’s not designed to replace anything. Just a small evolution of the hard drives.
For me, I use Safari, iTunes, iPhoto and mail 98% of the time. I think I will see a difference. If nothing else, in bootup, powering down and launching apps. Think it will be significantly louder than a standard 5400? Because my seagate now is pretty much dead silent.
You'll see a difference just because of the faster 7200rpm and the Flash cache. That's without a doubt.
Because of the Flash cache, you'll probably not notice any noise as it'll read off the cache instead of ramping up the drive. So in most situation, you won't notice anything but in writing files and any kind of write operations, you'll notice vibration from your laptop and a noise a bit higher but not that big of a difference from your current drive.
I love how quiet the macbook is but I'll sacrifice. I'll keep you guys posted.