• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Apple / Smoking-Fast Laptops: Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD Disk Drive Confirmed!

Smoking-Fast Laptops: Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD Disk Drive Confirmed!

May 21, 2010 By Stephen 2 Comments

There has been much speculation that a new generation of hybrid flash/hard disk drives was right around the corner, and Provantage confirmed it today: The reseller posted a family of “Momentus XT” 2.5″ laptop drives for sale on their web site, shipping in 3-4 weeks. Many other sites began listing the drives as well, and The Register got the scoop, benchmarks, and official comment.

Hybrid Hard Drives: Take Two

Thar she blows! Seagate's hybrid ssd/hard disk drive is real!

The new drive family sports 4 GB of NAND flash and 32 MB of DRAM operating in tandem as a cache. It is a 2.5″ model, and since Seagate doesn’t currently produce a drive fatter than 9.5 mm one can assume it is a two-platter model and will work in most laptops. It sports a 3 Gb/s SATA interface with native command queueing (NCQ), nicely up to date but nothing special.

There are three models in the Momentus XT line, all with the same 4 GB/32 MB cache:

Model Capacity Street price
ST92505620AS 250 GB Unknown
ST93205620AS 320 GB $111.59
ST95005620AS 500 GB $133.84

Unlike the previous-generation H-HDD drives, the new Seagates have fully-integrated SSD cache featuring speedy SLC chips. The dependence on the host operating system to make caching decisions was one of the things that sunk H-HDDs in the past, but this looks to be an entirely different solution. Seagate looks to have integrated the flash as an extension of the RAM cache and is using the drive’s own logic to determine what to cache and when. This will not only be more-generally applicable (not requiring a special OS) but will likely work better, since on-drive cache management has improved greatly over the years.

Stephen’s Stance

Assuming I’m right about Seagate’s fully-integrated cache architecture, this drive ought to blow away everything else on the market. The Register includes test results showing SSD-like performance for many workloads, yet this drive is half the cost and twice the capacity. It beats the 10k VelociRaptor drive in every test and will absolutely smoke any “normal” 7200 or 5400 rpm laptop drive. Feel free to exclaim “wow!” at this point.

How excited am I? How about this: Although I upgraded it just last month with a 640 GB Toshiba hard disk drive, I want a Momentus XT in my MacBook Pro. I’d rather have one of these than a straight SSD, considering the mix of performance, capacity, and price. Maybe I can move the Toshiba into an MCE Technologies OptiBay?

I will be watching this release with great interest. Word is that Seagate will officially unveil the drive in a webcast on Wednesday, May 26. I look forward to a flood of performance tests from my favorite consumer sites, and expect it will interest the enterprise guys, too (this means you, Howard!) Could hybrid drives finally be getting real?

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

Filed Under: Apple, Enterprise storage, Personal, Terabyte home Tagged With: flash, H-HDD, Howard Marks, hybrid drives, hybrid hard disk drive, MacBook Pro, MCE Technologies, Momentus XT, NAND, NCQ, OptiBay, Provantage, Seagate, SLC, SSD, The Register, Toshiba, Western Digital

Primary Sidebar

Don’t start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don’t. They’ll make you look like chopped liver.

Harlan Ellison

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    My Visit to Bletchley Park

    August 3, 2012

    How Will Cisco Recover From The Consumer Strategy Blunder?

    January 2, 2013

    Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

    February 21, 2011

    Scaling Storage In Conventional Arrays

    November 19, 2013

    The Myths of Standardization

    December 15, 2011

    Deduplication Coming to Primary Storage

    September 16, 2008

    ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

    July 10, 2017

    Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

    July 19, 2017

    How Smart Is the Mondaine Helvetica Smart Watch?

    December 30, 2015

    How To Sync Your iPad With Your Exchange Server

    April 3, 2010

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in