Seagate has definitely gotten the attention of road warriors and storage nerds with their Momentus XT hybrid hard disk drive. Many agree with Brent Ozar, who called for it to be a standard component of every laptop. Even I was impressed! But the Momentus XT hasn’t seen much (any?) uptake by OEMs. Perhaps customers weren’t ready to pay a little extra for a lot more performance?
Regardless, it’s fairly straightforward to upgrade the hard disk drive in just about any laptop to take advantage of the Momentus XT’s excellent performance – even a MacBook Pro! That’s why I’m psyched to see the 500 GB Momentus XT listed on Amazon.com for just $114.99. That’s only a little more than a standard 7200 rpm 500 GB hard disk drive, and the performance is notably better.
Any numbers comparing this drive to a regular 500gb/7200rpm drive and an SSD?
Found a good comparison article by following some other links in this article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/1
So an updated question: How well does this perform in a Mac laptop? What I’ve noticed is substantial slow-down on my older MB Pro when there’s a lot of virtual memory usage (e.g. when running several apps plus Parallels.) For my next MBP (hopefully in the next 2-3 months), I’m thinking about this vs a much smaller SSD (and an FW800 backup drive for large datasets that won’t fit on the SSD, like my iTunes collection.)