We all trying to acheive faster speeds with pretty much everything we do. Just last week I have timed myself depositing some cash in to my bank account from ATM. The whole process took nearly 3 minutes and even that puzzled me as what can be done to speed up the process. The same applies to the hard drive speeds. We are at the point where the bottle neck in the average PC is the hard drive and its speed but everything comes with a price. Buying a SSD could be an expensive task. Depending on the capacity you easily can throw down 300$ for 128 Gig SSD hard drive. Sure the performance is unmatched to the mechanical hard drives but the capacity sure doesn't sound so appealing. Thankfully our friends at Seagate have came up with a hybrid solution, Momentus XT. Momentus XT is a solid state hard drive which is based on 4GB SLC NAND solid state memory and 500 GB SATA 3Gb/s hard drive. Combining a two worlds with Adaptive Memory technology and being reasonably priced Momentus XT just might become a mid step between mechanical and SSD migration. Lets take a closer look at Momentus XT and see what it has to offer.

About the Product

Following information is taken from the Seagate web site.

Get SSD-like Performance Today

The Seagate® Momentus® XT drive is a solid state hybrid with Adaptive Memory™ technology, enabling the drive to deliver SSD-like performance along with higher capacity. The Momentus XT drive is designed for all standard laptop PCs and is OS-, driver- and software-independent, making this drive easy to integrate and easy to use. Adaptive Memory technology enables the drive to tailor performance to the user. Whether you are gaming, editing digital media or crunching numbers, performance is optimized and ready for your next move.

Compare solid state hybrid drives to SSD and HDD.

Key Specifications

• 500GB, 320GB and 250GB hard drive capacity options
• 4GB SLC NAND solid state memory
• 7200-RPM spindle speed
• 32MB of drive-level cache
• SATA 3Gb/s with Native Command Queuing

Best-Fit Applications

• High-end laptops and workstations
• High-performance gamer laptops
• Fast external enclosures: USB 3.0, eSATA
• Small form factor PCs

Performance to Match Your Style

Designed with high-performance core components on an innovative platform, the Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive consists of a 7200-RPM hard drive with 32MB of cache, 4GB of solid state SLC NAND flash storage, and Adaptive Memory technology.

Adaptive Memory technology intelligently monitors your frequently used applications and data files, then places them into the solid state portion of the drive so they can be quickly recalled.

Specifications

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at Seagate's Momentus XT.

Closer look

Front shot		Rear shot

The physical appearance of the Momentus XT isn't all that different from any other 2.5" lap top hard drive. In fact there hasn't been any changes to that particular size ever. Remembering IEDE connection, yup all the same size. The only thing that really has changed is the interface.

Detailed Information		Features and Specifications

We have a 500 Gb version of Momentus XT and this one feels a little bit heavier than our standard 250 GB Momentus drive. For our testing purposes we are going to be looking at three hard drives Momentus (250 GB 5400.4 RPM), Momentus XT (500 GB 7200 RPM) and OCZ Vertex (32 GB SSD). These three hard drive will give us basic understanding of the performance difference between each of them.

Detailed Information

Now that we have gotten the pictionary out of the way, lets take a look at some test data.

Testing

We have used HD Tune PRO 4.01 and HD Tach 3.0.4.0. Even though Seagate does not recommend the use of HD Tune as it is designed to read a raw data and the performance experience from the use would vary, we are still going to take a look at the raw reading from these drives. And talk about our personal experience as we have lived on Momentus XT for over a week to get the feeling/performance. All of the following hard drive has been imaged with Acronis and are running Win 7 32 bit OS. The machine we have used to perform our test is by Asus F8SP. This laptop had 3 GB of ram and HD Radeon 3650 graphics card installed so it will be a suitable match for an ideal test system.

Momentus 250 GB

Momentus 250 GB HD Tune Pro Benchmark

Our first benchmark was performed with HD Tune Pro. The Momentus is not the faster drive out there. Running on 5400.4 RPM the access time is rather slow for these type of drives and what we got here is a 16.1 ms access time. The minimum raw speed we have experienced in this benchmark was 31.1 MB/s and maximum speed was around 60 MB/s. The overall average speed of Momentus 250 GB drive was 48.2 MB/s and the burst speed achieved was at 112.7 MB/s.

Momentus 250 GB HD Tune Pro File Benchmark

The File Benchmark on Momentus showed us that the file read and write speeds gradually approach the 50-55MB/s thresh hold and kind of stays there for the rest of the test.

Momentus HD Tach 8mb vs 32 mb Benchmark

To double check our numbers we have look at the HD Tach benchmark and according to its results the average read speed of Momentus is 50.6 MB/s with average burst speed of 197.3MB/s. What is important to mention here is the random access times and average read speeds.

Momentus XT 500 GB

Momentus XT 500 GB HD Tune Pro Benchmark

Our next HD Tune benchmark was done on Momentus XT. What was rather surprising here is the access time. Since this hard drive has a 4 GB NAND Flash preface, it is a best bet that the access time has been ran against the flash ram and not the actual hard drive. There were some drops in the benchmark as you can see from the graph above and that was kind of strange as the minimum read speed was 12 MB/s The Maximum transfer speed was 107.2 MB/s. The burst rate for the Momentus XT was clocked at 118 MB/s and the average read speed was 80.5 MB/s. This is nearly 2x the performance increase over Momentus 5400.4 hard drive.

Momentus XT 500 GB HD Tune Pro File Benchmark

The File benchmark was rather impressive as we saw a dramatic increase in read and write speeds of Momentus XT. The gradual climb in the read and write speeds showed us that the stable point of Momentus XT was some where about 90 and 100 MB/s.

Momentus XT HD Tach 8mb vs 32 mb Benchmark

Once again to double check our numbers we ran HD Tach. The average read speed we have gotten was 88.2 MB/s and the burst speed of 206 MB/s. The burst speed of Momentus XT varied as this time we have gotten much higher speeds than benchmark with HD Tune.

OCZ Vertex 32 GB

OCZ Vertex 32 GB HD Tune Pro Benchmark

Now that we have a basic understanding what are the Momentus and Momentus XT is capable, its a good time to take a look at a simple SSD hard drive and its performance. The advertized speed of OCZ Vertex 32GB SSD is up to 230 MB/s read and 135 MB/s write with 80 MB/s sustained. As you can see the performance benchmark on OCZ Vertex is pretty much linear, which is expected from a SSD drive. The minimum transfer speed achieved was 88.2 MB/s ad maximum speed was achieved of 172.7 MB/s. Over all average speed of OCZ Vertex was 131.1 MB/s. The burst rate and access time came very close to the same results as Momentus XT.

OCZ Vertex 32 GB HD Tune Pro File Benchmark

The file benchmark showed us that the read performance is much higher than the write performance of this drive. Peaking out at about 160 MB/s on read and 117 MB/s on write.

OCZ Vertex HD Tach 8mb vs 32 mb Benchmark

The HD Tach showed us the great access time of 0.1 ms and average read speed of 147.2 MB/s. The average burst speed of the OCZ Vertex was rather slow at 133.3 MB/s which comparing to Momentus XT which was recorded at 206.9 MB/s.

PC Mark Vantage Advanced Score

So great now we know what are some of the differences of the Momentum, Momentum XT and Vertex we have decided to run PC Mark Vantage Advanced to see what kind of performance we would get out of this drive in the average daily operations. We have ran PC Mark Vantage Hard Drive Benchmarks and the scores for this benchmark were 3123, 5423, 5940, 6010 and 6033. As you can see the benchmarks slowly improved over time.

PC Mark Vantage Advanced Benchmark Scores

We next wanted to look at the every day values over time. Five benchmarks were performed and above graph describes every benchmark and its performance over time. The Adaptive Memory technology really did kicked in at the fifth benchmark. As you can see the more benchmarks we performed the more stable values we got.

Conclusion

Just by looking at our test data you can clearly see who is the winner. You got it the SSD however, considering the performance of Momentus XT and price per storage Momentus XT becomes a clear winner among the consumer. Consumer who doesn't want to spend a fortune on SSD drive. If you want a SSD like performance out of your application you need to consider Momentus XT. What makes Momentus XT great is the 4 GB NAND flash ram which is utilized by an Adaptive Memory technology. This technology is designed to cache off most often use data files and have them be ready for your access at any time. Looking at the over all start up performance of this drive, it has been greatly improved as it feels like an SSD drive. As we have mentioned earlier in our review, we have lived on the Momentus XT had drive for just about a week. The first few hours of play were the most challenging as the Adaptive Memory technology learned our behavioral habits and cached off the right files. Seagate advises that you restart your machine at least 3 time for the Adaptive Memory to kick in. So what makes this drive so valuable to an average consumer? Price per Gb. At the time of this review the cost of OCZ Vertex 32 GB was 120 USD and the cost of the Momentus XT 500 GB was around 129$. For a 256 GB SSD drive you are looking to drop around 660$, this is just the half of the capacity which is offered by Momentus XT. It gives me a great pleasure to award Seagate Momentus XT a 10/10! Great product for the right price guys!

Some pros we found:

Great performance comparing to SSD drives.

Highly affordable.

Adaptive Memory technology.

Some cons we found:

None that we could find.