First impressions: Momentus XT 500 GB vs. Samsung 840 500 GB
It's been a bit under 24 hours since I swapped out my "hybrid" Seagate Momentus XT for the Samsung 840, both 500 GB. While I'm pleased with the the performance of the Samsung, my advice would be to either save money and go with the Momentus XT or to pay more and go for a faster SSD.
The boot speed has certainly been improved. Even after rebooting a few times so that the Momentus XT moved the relevant data to the SSD for faster performance my bootup time was still at least ten seconds. With the 840, the "loading wheel" on the boot screen displays for what seems like less than a second before disappearing. I haven't clocked it, but bootup time is less than ten seconds for certain. Logging into my account - which has a bunch of programs that load at startup - is also much faster than the XT.
But this is where I find myself slightly disappointed, although I'll admit that my expectations might have been unrealistic. I've seen videos where people open multiple programs at once and the windows snap open before the programs have completed a single bounce on the dock. While the 840 is faster than the XT (and there's no need to wait for the drive to "learn" your activities), it's not noticeably
that much faster. My big test for this is loading Apple Mail, which has tens of thousands of messages dating back for years in its database. The Momentus XT would bring up the Mail window in a single bounce, but then would delay for two or four seconds while the messages were loaded. The Mail dock icon bounces two to three times with the 840, but when it's done bouncing the program is fully ready to go: all of the messages have been loaded. While I haven't used a watch to time it, I feel that the 840 is either barely faster or about the same as the XT when it comes to load times there.
This isn't to say that the drives are completely equal. Certain websites cause very brief pauses as a plugin was initialized; while the Momentus XT cut down on those pauses, the 840 has seemingly completely eliminated them. (Also, if you switched browsers then the pauses would become very apparent with the XT - at least, until a few uses, after which the drive would store the browser parts on the SSD.) Spotlight searching is near-instant with the 840, while the XT would still take a second or two to fully compile all results. Thumbnail loading in the Finder is faster with the 840, but not massively so - and it's not instant.
If you look over benchmarks, the 840 is far from being the worst performer. In benchmarks I've seen (specifically
HotHardware's review) it fares very well in read performance tests, only lagging in write performance. For casual home use the read performance matters more, so this isn't a big issue.
Ultimately, what I'm noticing may be more noteworthy to the Momentus XT instead of the Samsung 840. Perhaps it isn't that the Samsung 840 is poor or underperforming, but that the Momentus XT really is just that good. That would be all the more impressive considering that the 500 GB variant that I have is supposedly noticeably slower than the 750 GB variant (which doubles the on-board SSD capacity from 4 GB to 8 GB). The Momentus XT certainly felt like a
huge improvement over the 5400 RPM drive that came with my Macbook Pro, but perhaps that was close to as good as it gets for average, casual use, and the Samsung 840 can't offer much over that.
I have moved my Momentus XT over to my wife's computer. Originally I was thinking about finding a smaller-capacity SSD on sale and then replacing the Momentus XT yet again, but after these findings I don't feel the need to. SSDs will inevitably become faster and cheaper with time, and when I need to upgrade or replace my Samsung 840 I will carefully evaluate the performance of SSDs against the hybrid HDD/SSD offerings. I don't regret the purchase and still appreciate the little speed boosts, but at this point I would buy another Momentus XT over a SSD if I were performing an upgrade to a system. But who knows? After I spend more time with the 840 and get used to it I'll switch over to my wife's computer to see if it feels noticeably slower. Speed increases aren't appreciated quite as much as poor performance, after all!
For reference, these observations were all made on a late 2011 Macbook Pro, 2.2 GHz i7 with 16 GB of RAM running at 1600 MHz. I have external drives that occasionally slow down operating system and program operations. The Samsung 840 is running the latest firmware version (DXT07B0Q), has had a few optimizations made with Chameleon SSD Optimizer (TRIM enabled, NOATime disabled, local backups disabled, sleep mode A), and is filled roughly halfway to capacity (252 GB used, 247 GB free). I have used the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test to verify that my drive is operating similarly to others (write speed seems to go up to 330 MB/s, read speeds to 505 MB/s), but of course, these are raw speeds that don't indicate anything about the random read performance that impacted my observations.
