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Installed Momentus XT in my 13"

MikhailT said:
Who cares about booting? Seriously? It's not really important. How often do people boot/reboot laptops? How many people sleep/hibernate instead of shutting down?
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I boot my MacBook every day, just as I do my desktop, and when I'm dual-booting with Windows 7, I boot it many, many times. I hardly ever take advantage of its sleep and hibernate features. I boot far more often than I open Word or Photoshop. Boot speeds are for me the most important indicator of real-world performance, much more so than the loading times of applications I only use occasionally.

OSX doesn't even support TRIM. Expect much more than a 10% speed reduction as it gets full.

I'll address the rest later, as it's frustrating to deal with large blocks of text on my iPhone.
 
Xombie11 said:
I boot my MacBook every day, just as I do my desktop, and when I'm dual-booting with Windows 7, I boot it many, many times. I hardly ever take advantage of its sleep and hibernate features. I boot far more often than I open Word or Photoshop. Boot speeds are for me the most important indicator of real-world performance, much more so than the loading times of applications I only use occasionally.

OSX doesn't even support TRIM. Expect much more than a 10% speed reduction as it gets full.

I'll address the rest later, as it's frustrating to deal with large blocks of text on my iPhone.
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For people who dual boot all the time, yes it's a factor and the hybrid HDD/SD is a serious consideration. But it's not the most important factor, it's a factor. We still have no idea what the impact is between switching OSes. Is there enough space on the XT's cache to handle both while holding the applications for each OS? We're talking about 4GB here. While it doesn't care about what OS you use, the problem is what get cached and how often is it updated?

For high ends SSDs, TRIM isn't that important, the IGC restore the performance to 90% regardless of time and capacity usage.

Low end SSDs are an exception and in this case, I wouldn't recommend people buy them either.


Update:
Source
This is Windows 7's SuperFetch in work.
startup_time.png


Vista's full drive
vista_startup_time.png


Adding more applications for Vista
application-loading.png
 
MikhailT said:
We're talking about 4GB here. While it doesn't care about what OS you use, the problem is what get cached and how often is it updated?
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Its "memory" will get wiped every time you defragment the drive. So that could be a plus and a major downfall as you will have to defrag the mechanical drive throughout its life but then the ssd will be defraged too.
 
Not necessarily, pretty much all the smaller files on your hard drive will fit into 4GB.
 
Why all the heated discussion over hard ware components?

It's faster than a normal HDD, and a thousand dollars cheaper than a similarly sized SSD. Seems like it fits the bill perfectly, faster and less expensive than what its replacing.

It's not being sold as an SSD replacement, why all the trash talking? :confused:
 
I think part of the issue right now is that no one has it in stock (including tiger direct, circuit city, compusa) (check shipping date says june 10th). It's still getting all the hype without a lot of factual backup because of non availability.
 
So basically you get the capacity of a typical Hard Drive, with the Boot up performance of an SSD, as well as loading your most frequently used programmes at SSD speed ?

If that's right, i'm sold.
 
Deeya said:
Why all the heated discussion over hard ware components?

It's faster than a normal HDD, and a thousand dollars cheaper than a similarly sized SSD. Seems like it fits the bill perfectly, faster and less expensive than what its replacing.

It's not being sold as an SSD replacement, why all the trash talking? :confused:
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What trash talking? We're all communicating about the device itself and how it's different from the actual SSD. Not everybody understands how it works and why it works, so we all are talking about the details and the implementations.

It is after all a first of its kind.


Sarngate said:
So basically you get the capacity of a typical Hard Drive, with the Boot up performance of an SSD, as well as loading your most frequently used programmes at SSD speed ?

If that's right, i'm sold.
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Pretty much. It still carries all the inherit limitations of the HDD though: noise, vibration, fragmentation, and so on.
 
It's designed to cache small files, not your porn collection. 4GB is what they decided was the most useful, and even though you have a 500GB drive that doesn't mean you have more than 4GB of (often used) executables and libraries to cache.
 
trondah said:
It's designed to cache small files, not your porn collection. 4GB is what they decided was the most useful, and even though you have a 500GB drive that doesn't mean you have more than 4GB of (often used) executables and libraries to cache.
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The drive looks at access patterns over time (most likely via a history table of LBAs and their frequency of access) and pulls some data into the NAND. If a read request comes in for an LBA that is present in the NAND, it's serviced out of the 4GB chip. If the LBA isn't present in the NAND, the data comes from the platters.
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Source: Anandtech

Suppose somebody uses a VM image that's like 3GB, does XT cache the files inside VM image or just the image itself? Since XT uses LBA blocks and not actual files, does it cache LBA that is actively being used as part of the VM image or does it cache all LBA blocks of the total 3GB VM image?
 
chopper dave said:
Or if you're uncomfortable with following forum terminal commands, just connect your time machine drive during the OS install, and choose to restore from a TM backup. This also works perfectly.
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Not necessarily! If your USERNAME is the same on the NEW HDD during OS X installation; you'll get file permission issues (OS X Journaled; not case-sensitive) and your new username will be appended with "1". So careful not to do that; I ran into this a few weeks back; not happy. Although you can rename it; its still there.
 
Hexero said:
Is it making very much noise?
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I'm more concerned about HEAT when running just basic email/safari/preview/itunes music playback type stuff vs. serious work!!

To the op, how are you finding your heat temperatures in the same usage and area?!

maratus said:
Looks like Momentus XT is perfect for G-Drive mini FW800 with few VM images and other stuff like OS's onboard. But I'd stick with 120Gb Vertex as system drive.
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Using this in a G-Drive sounds like a mint idea, hoping the oxford chipset can do heavy duty for FW800 with it. Also I wouldn't even consider your 120GB Vertex just too small to carry data and I'm not getting rid of my Superdrive just yet.
 
I am thinking about getting one for my Macbook Pro that should be here very soon. My utmost concern falls in the vibration. How bad is it? The only thing I can compare to is a 08 pre unibody MBP with Hitachi Travelstar 7K320, which is hardly noticeable is transferring files.
 
exe163 said:
I am thinking about getting one for my Macbook Pro that should be here very soon. My utmost concern falls in the vibration. How bad is it? The only thing I can compare to is a 08 pre unibody MBP with Hitachi Travelstar 7K320, which is hardly noticeable is transferring files.
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I've been using it for 3 days and haven't noticed any vibration yet with normal use...
 
MikhailT said:
Source: Anandtech

Suppose somebody uses a VM image that's like 3GB, does XT cache the files inside VM image or just the image itself? Since XT uses LBA blocks and not actual files, does it cache LBA that is actively being used as part of the VM image or does it cache all LBA blocks of the total 3GB VM image?
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It definitely won't cache the entire image because there is a hard limit to how big reads it will cache. Even if it did, you aren't reading the entire image every time you access it. I'm guessing it will be able to cache reads inside the image but I can't say for sure.
 
trondah said:
It definitely won't cache the entire image because there is a hard limit to how big reads it will cache. Even if it did, you aren't reading the entire image every time you access it. I'm guessing it will be able to cache reads inside the image but I can't say for sure.
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Exactly, we can't say for sure. They should tell us this info. I would like to know for sure.

What about the ISO images that we mount often, what about game files like Steam GCF that are 800+mb?

If there are hard limit restricting the cache to small specific files then the question is, do people really use more than 4GB of ~512kb-1MB files enough to justify more flash?
 
trondah said:
It's designed to cache small files, not your porn collection. 4GB is what they decided was the most useful, and even though you have a 500GB drive that doesn't mean you have more than 4GB of (often used) executables and libraries to cache.
Click to expand...
The worry is that, for those of us with dual booting operating systems, between OS X, Windows 7, Photoshop, Word, AutoCADD, etc. the 4 GB of flash memory will get swamped quickly, nullifying the usefulness of the hard drive.
 
JacaByte said:
The worry is that, for those of us with dual booting operating systems, between OS X, Windows 7, Photoshop, Word, AutoCADD, etc. the 4 GB of flash memory will get swamped quickly, nullifying the usefulness of the hard drive.
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I'm pretty sure it only caches bits. ie it is not file system aware. So whatever is being accessed frequently, the drive will mirror in the SSD. In relation to the VM for example, although the file may be 10gb, really only few hundred MBs (if even) are accessed by the system. A photoshop may be few hundred MBs, but much much less is being accessed on regular basis during usage.
 
MikhailT said:
Exactly, we can't say for sure. They should tell us this info. I would like to know for sure.

What about the ISO images that we mount often, what about game files like Steam GCF that are 800+mb?
Click to expand...

It is quite sure, obviously it is not filesystem aware so it has to look at the reads themselves. I guess there is a possibility that the way it reads into an image will change when you have a VMware growing image for instance. ISO images should be fine though, but are you really reading stuff out of ISO images often enough that you need it cached?

If there are hard limit restricting the cache to small specific files then the question is, do people really use more than 4GB of ~512kb-1MB files enough to justify more flash?
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It should be enough for most people I think.

Jacabyte said:
The worry is that, for those of us with dual booting operating systems, between OS X, Windows 7, Photoshop, Word, AutoCADD, etc. the 4 GB of flash memory will get swamped quickly, nullifying the usefulness of the hard drive.
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At some point you will probably be better of with an SSD than a drive with 32GB of cache. All I'm saying is 4GB sounds reasonable if you think about it. People are asking for more even though we don't have much info on it yet to know how it will hold up...
 
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