Seagate hybrid drive delivers SSD performance at HDD price
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After failing to gain market traction with its first iteration of hybrid drives three years ago, Seagate today announced a new hard-disk and solid-state combination drive with as much as 500GB of capacity starting at $113.
While Seagate's last attempt to market a hybrid drive focused on energy savings, its new Momentus XT is all about performance and capacity.
The drive has special software that tracks a person's use trends and then uses the SSD component of the drive to optimize performance, and it can adjust that performance over time with changes in user behavior.
The Momentus XT is a 7200-rpm serial ATA (SATA) hard-disk drive combined with 4GB of SSD capacity and 32MB of DDR3 cache memory. Seagate was unable to offer read, write speeds on the drive.
The combination, Seagate said, blows by traditional 7,200-rpm and 10,000-rpm hard-disk drives for read and write speeds, and nearly matches pure-SSD performance for the same.
"We heard loud and clear from our user's feedback back [on our last hybrid drive] that our next drive had better be a high performance one," said Mark Wojtasiak, senior product marketing manager at Seagate.
"We booted within 5 seconds of an SSDs boot time, and we were 15 seconds faster than a 300GB Velociraptor and 36 seconds faster than our 7200-rpm [Momentus] drive," Wojtasiak said.
After failing to gain market traction with its first iteration of hybrid drives three years ago, Seagate today announced a new hard-disk and solid-state combination drive with as much as 500GB of capacity starting at $113.
While Seagate's last attempt to market a hybrid drive focused on energy savings, its new Momentus XT is all about performance and capacity.
The drive has special software that tracks a person's use trends and then uses the SSD component of the drive to optimize performance, and it can adjust that performance over time with changes in user behavior.
The Momentus XT is a 7200-rpm serial ATA (SATA) hard-disk drive combined with 4GB of SSD capacity and 32MB of DDR3 cache memory. Seagate was unable to offer read, write speeds on the drive.
The combination, Seagate said, blows by traditional 7,200-rpm and 10,000-rpm hard-disk drives for read and write speeds, and nearly matches pure-SSD performance for the same.
"We heard loud and clear from our user's feedback back [on our last hybrid drive] that our next drive had better be a high performance one," said Mark Wojtasiak, senior product marketing manager at Seagate.
"We booted within 5 seconds of an SSDs boot time, and we were 15 seconds faster than a 300GB Velociraptor and 36 seconds faster than our 7200-rpm [Momentus] drive," Wojtasiak said.
