Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Gen 2 (ST750LX003)

INTRODUCTION

Seagate has sold over 1 million of the first generation Momentus XT hybrid hard drive. The Momentus XT was a big success that finally brought a hybrid hard drive to the market, striking a good balance of performance, price, and storage capacity.

We all know that SSD's are the undisputed leader in performance. However, despite the fact that SSD pricing has been dropping significantly over the last year, it is still relative expensive at approximately $1.5-$2 per gigabyte of storage, and the price skyrockets as capacity. It is unlikely that we will ever see SSD prices fall to the range of mechanical drives ($0.05 per gigabyte).

However, even if we assume pricing is not an issue, we still face the problem of storage capacity. Not only SSDs do have a lower price-to-capacity ratio, their storage capacity also pales in comparison to that of mechanical drives. The largest SSD with native SATA interface has 1TB of storage capacity (OCZ Colossus), which is a tiny volume compared to 3TB mechanical drives. As it was, the OCZ Colossus was expensive and did not stay in the market for long. Even if we compare SSD's against 2.5" form factor mechanical drives, a hard drive will still offer twice the capacity of the SSD. Thus, there has been a resurgence of hybrid technology such as Intel Smart Response and Seagate’s Momentus XT that try to bring the best of the two worlds.

Desktop users often do not worry about storage capacity, because most users who want the best performance go with an SSD as the main drive and pair that with a large capacity mechanical drive for storage. For mobile environments, where space limitation and portability that often will not allow addition of a second drive, the limited storage capacity of SSD's means laptop users must choose between performance and capacity.

The Seagate Momentus XT is designed to aimed exactly at the market that wants the performance of SSD without sacrificing the storage capacity. The Momentus XT bridges the two worlds by offering the performance close to an SSD with onboard NANDs acting as caching devices for the commonly used applications. Since it is still technically a mechanical drive with a spinning platter, it does not sacrifice any storage space. As a result, users get faster boot time, quick application launching, and a speedy system while retaining the ample storage capacity offered by traditional hard drives.