- 5 Comments
- HOTNESS UNHOT
Amazon has the Seagate ST750LX003 Momentus XT 750GB Solid State Hybrid Drive for $100 with free shipping. Features SSD-like performance with hard drive capacity, Adaptive Memory technology to optimize performance, and claims 80 percent faster performance than traditional 7200RPM drives in benchmark scores.
Retail: $180
I have one of these in a bag somewhere. When I tried it, it was barely faster than a regular drive. And when I tried to justify using it versus the likelihood of failure of a Seagate drive, caution won out.
Marketing departments' dirty tactics have mislead you into believing Seagate is less reliable.
I've been using a few for maybe 9 months now. Benchmarking is odd but for everyday use, they are noticeably better than a standard magnetic disc.
swreynolds - it takes some time to learn your habits. It pre-caches certain things, and to that extent, it works wonderfully. It won't help with load times on a game you're playing for the first time, but it'll help significantly with windows start up speeds after several boots. For me it wasn't just barely faster - i was comparing mine to a velociraptor, and still dropped several seconds off my win7 start time, after the initial drive-learning. My common use programs like outlook launch in a blink now. Same with several of the steam games i play (bl2, bf3, etc) - launches them all in a blink.
I wouldn't choose this as a storage drive - the pre-caching simply has no benefit there. As an OS drive it worked great and within about 10 reboots, was noticeably faster than my vraptor.
Yeah, good option for a multimedia laptop with only one HDD bay... where an SSD with enough capacity would be too expensive.