Hybrid SSD/HDD

[kolax]

I've been looking at the Seagate 750GB MomentusXT Hybrid hard drive.

I've read that it isn't quite as good as other SSD/HDD hybrid solutions, but I haven't actually found many other options.

Has anyone used this? How does it fair? I'm currently using a 500GB 5400RPM hard drive with max read/write of around 50-60MB/s.

 

[DjPLaTiNuM]

Seagate Hybrid SSD/HDD

I'm looking for the same question to be answered, I'm looking to upgrade the 500 GB Hard Drive on my mid-2012 13" 2.5 GHz i5 and of course the Seagate Hybrid seems like a good option.

 

[clyde2801]

I'm looking for the same question to be answered, I'm looking to upgrade the 500 GB Hard Drive on my mid-2012 13" 2.5 GHz i5 and of course the Seagate Hybrid seems like a good option.

I've seen really nothing but good reviews on newegg, amazon and bestbuy online. Which is pretty amazing, come to think of it.

Been wondering about updating or not with this, but may up the ram first and wait on replacing the HDD. SSD prices have been dropping like a rock over the last year, and waiting will pay its own dividend.

 

[kolax]

AnandTech has quite a good review too.

Well, I've gone and ordered it. Amazon has it for £108. I guess at that price, SSD hybrid or not, still decent for 750GB at 7200RPM.

Due in 2 days, so will report back performance. Though, I'll be installing Mountain Lion on it too, so won't be a fair comparison to what I'm using right now.

 

[MacBookProzak]

750GB Momentus XT Hybrid hard drive that has 8GB of SSD on it is a GREAT drive. I have had zero issues and my MBP that i cut video on 10 to 12 hours a day on... if there were problems with this drive given the heavy use I put on a machine, then they would have surfaced by now, I doubt i am that lucky to be exempt from problems if there were wide spread issues.

If you take a look this thread you can read about how great my 2012 MBP has been working with this drive.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1386040/

 

[thedarkhorse]

These momentus drives actually have the best of both worlds when it comes to longevity with heavy use. Typical hard drives can be worn out by always accessing various small files, while typical SSDs are worn out by long reads/writes of large files. With the momentus the idea is that all your frequently accessed small files will be handled through the SSD cache and all your larger longer read files will be read by the HDD, effectively giving you the best of both worlds while mitigating the downsides of each.

I have a 750gb XT as my main drive in my windows tower, & I upgraded from the original 500gb. Definitely a good choice over a HDD for an OS drive, and when price:capacity is an issue with SSD it is a good budget oriented alternative.

 

[dusk007]

It is definitely a lot better than a standard hdd but a real hybrid of using a small SSD + a big data HDD is quite a lot better for noise, speed, power consumption.
As are the Intel SRT based solutions with much bigger caches. They really serve well as write caches for everything you download on a normal day. Cannot have those on a MBP
They should have really put some mSATA slot in there somewhere. given how thin the rMBP is and all the space between the logicboard and the bottom there would theoretically be enough space to squeeze 6 of those tiny things in or 2 of the thinner longer ones. All that would be needed is one and that would be a great feature.
But obviously you cannot give the cMBP a feature that makes it look good next to the all hailed rMBP in which they didn't leave enough space to do the same.

 

[Sairo]

I have an 500 GB model in my macbook and I can definitely recommend one.
I've used it as my main drive for 1 or 2 weeks until I received my SSD and I did enjoy the boot boot. My OS and programs jumped up much quicker than my stock 5400rpm drive.

Don't expect the magic any real SSD will do, but give the drive a chance to settle and then sit back and enjoy the miracles it can do.
Seagate did a good job on these drives.

 

[kolax]

Well I installed Mountain Lion on my stock HDD while I was waiting for the hybrid to be delivered, so I can do a relatively fair before/after comparison.

I'm blown away how much more responsive and quicker everything is. The stock HDD I was using was a 500GB 5400RPM Hitachi drive, which generally crawled along at the best of times. Running Virtual Machines generally brought my Mac to its knees.

The combination of the faster head speed, more condensed platter and 8GB SSD are making life much better.

Anyone in the same situation as me - wanting speed, capacity but at a good price, I definitely recommend this!

Amazon have it on offer right now too, so it is really a no brainer.

 

[MassMacMan]

I have a new 750GB Momentus XT in an external NexStar3 USB3.0 enclosure. Attached to my rMBP, it allows for pretty speedy data transfer. Blackmagic tests the read/write speeds at around 115/110 MB/s, which is quite satisfactory for my needs. It boots the rMBP in about 20 seconds after three 'learning curve' exercises. I can clone my SSD (currently holding ~110GB) in under 10 minutes. It's my solution to living with an internal 256GB SSD.