Hybrid HDD drives...Momentus XT

[Aussie Allan]

 So now we have spinning platters with 4 gig of  NAND Flash on-board,... Enter the Seagate's Momentus XT series, with the adaptive capability that's advertised to speed up programs and boot times....I bought one 500GB drive....then two!..as they work brilliantly .Seagate seem to be responding to the raid community with a firmware update recently and I envisage another shortly as they get there heads around TRIM working in a tandem (combined solid state and platters)  on there hardware when raided (I hope)

 What I would dearly like to know is peoples wins and losses with these drives in any configuration and problems and fixes you had with them. I think I might be getting a third to see there ability with raid5....raid5 rebuilds are a pain in the sphincter at best.... so I was thinking , would the NAND Flash make the parity rebuild any faster. With 3 drives configured to raid 5 with an OS installed, pulling a data cable on one drive for a second or two should send the operating system into cardiac arrest like hitting a sleeping dogs butt with a tasser I'm guessing, ... and then see how fast the rebuild is compared to the downtime this has caused me in the past...........Any experiences or takers!!!

  Aussie Allan   

[Dark Mantis]

Hi Allan

These drives seem to be catching on quite fast. I suppose the reasonable price  and speed increase is getting people who can't afford a SSD of significant size to purchase them. Personally I haven't tried one yet and have a 256GB SSD for my boot drive. Your idea of running three in a RAID5 array is interesting though and should make a nice boot setup. Hopefully you might get someone involved but so far there are not many people using them.

[Aussie Allan]

 Hi Mantis

 Being based in mech engineering I know a good product when I see one (Errrrrrr , I think) and at 80 odd quid a pop for 500Gb there cheap as chips, ... even a single one shaved 20 seconds of my boot times by the 3rd cycle (Adaptive on the fly)... 2 in raid0...220mb/ps=1TB of poor-man's SSD for £160 cant be all bad! Because of there price point against performance , I'm tipping these to go main stream big time. Personally if you have a laptop sitting around, rip one of these in, you won't be disappointed........I can see my 6 spinpoints (B drive) being replaced with these in the not too distant future and I suspect an exrta 30% performance and 3KG lighter to boot!,... not to mention greener power consumption!...Now I'm woffling. speak again soon.

 Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

HI

Yes I would agree at least for the interim while SSD prices remain quite high I expect them to plug the gap. As you say there is a terrific performance boost to be had.

[Wonderwrench]

I put an XT in my wife's laptop and it was well worth it for the price. The only down side with these drives is they only perform their best when the PC is used in a repetitive manner. Running AV scans or defraging the drive will cause a temporary performance loss.  Since my wife always uses her laptop in the same way every day and AV scans and defrags are only done once a month the drive performs much better than any conventional drive by far. For people that do not use their PC in a repetitive manner or manipulate large amounts of data on a regular basis an XT will be of little benefit.

Bill