Seagate Momentus XT 500GB

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] As computer technology continues to advance, there is no doubt that the trends toward mobility and portability are by far the largest on vendor minds. Being tied to a desktop is quickly becoming something that many people just cannot do. The world is undeniably heading towards a computerized future and I even foresee the day in my lifetime that hand-writing will become obsolete. With even elementary schools beginning to focus heavily on the computer as a tool, there is no doubt we'll rely on some form of computer for everyday life needs sooner rather than later. One of the major stumbling blocks has been the fact that portable computers were just not powerful enough to fulfill the needs of most users. That is no doubt been untrue for some time. The modern processor has been able to scale down in power needs quite well and there are a plethora of low budget high-power notebooks/netbooks available for our consumption. Using a portable PC as a desktop replacement is now not only a viable option, it is an option even the mass market can consider. The other major area of concern has been storage space. It seemingly took forever for densities to reach any useable levels. Now while I agree that many of us keep more data than required on our hard drives, there is also no reason we should not be able to have as much as we desire. Unfortunately, there has been one major tradeoff with notebook/netbook mechanical drives: speed. Even 7200RPM versions just don't have the speed that their desktop counterparts enjoy. For those transferring large amounts of data or requiring high access speeds, there really has been no viable solution other than the highly priced and density limited SSD drives. Speaking of SSD drives, they do have the potential to eliminate many of these stumbling blocks for us. No one can deny their speed and storage densities have begun to creep up to 500GB+ levels. Manufacturers have recently been able to refine their controllers to even make them fairly reliable. Sadly, their cost is still just out of reach for most of us. As I have said before, until they are available for under $1 per gigabyte, they are just not going to be accepted by the mass market. Mechanical storage has basically hit its uppermost limits when it comes to speed. Drive controller technology has made small steps forward, but nothing mind-blowing has been achieved. The SATA I bus has barely been fully saturated, never mind SATA II. The recent step up to the newest SATA III bus has been unofficially accepted as only benefitting SSD technology. Even our own in house testing has verified that there are little offered in gains for mechanical storage. Something else has to change to make up that difference, especially in the portable world. The best possible solution so far is not something new. We have seen various manufacturers give this technology some for over three years with varying success, but to date no one has really hit the nail on the head and got everything working just right. In theory, this is the perfect solution to both speed and density needs, the problem has been underwhelming performance coupled with less than reliable results. Seagate threw its hat into the hybrid storage game this year and with it made some really bold claims. From being able to keep up with desktop speeds to cutting access times dramatically, the company really seemed to be ready to give us all something special. Seagate has no doubt become one of the premier manufacturers of storage devices so to me it seemed like the likely company to pull this off. Using 4GB of SLC NAND on a production 7200RPM 32MB cache Momentus platform, Seagate is giving us the best of both worlds in a small form factor (SFF) package. The NAND memory is only used for reading purposes, no writing tasks are routed through it. The built in controller puts the most frequently accessed data on NAND while everything else gets routed to the mechanical section. Seagate's firmware does an excellent job of this and within a few cycles the drive quickly adapts to the user's needs. For today's review we have the 500GB Momentus XT in our labs along with the regular 7200.4 and 5400.6 variants as to give a better comparison between current available technology and the new Hybrid drive. We will also be comparing our results with all of our previous mechanical storage so you can get a full picture of just how they all stack up against one another. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. If there is a bit of information that we've omitted, or you wish to offer thoughts or suggest changes, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail or post in our forums. Test System. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing, with the obvious exception of the storage. Each hard drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. In addition, each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view our review of the respective product, or if a review doesn't exist, you will be led to the product page on the manufacturer's website. Component Techgage Hard Drive Test System Processor Intel Core i5-750 - Quad-Core, 2.66GHz Motherboard ASUS P7P55D Premium Memory OCZ Platinum 4GB DDR3-1600 Graphics Gigabyte GeForce 9600 GT Audio On-Board Audio Storage Seagate 320GB Barracuda 7200.10 (OS Drive) Tested Drives: Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB - 3G/bits Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB - 3G/bits Seagate Momentus 5400.4 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB - 6G/bits Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - 3Gbit/s Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB - 3Gbit/s Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB - 3Gbit/s Power Supply Corsair VX550 Chassis Zalman GS-1000 Display Dell 2407WFP-HC Et cetera LG DVD-ROM Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with PerfectDisk 10 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. Windows Vista Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. Windows Defender, Firewall, Security Center, Search, and Updates are disabled. Because it gives a more realistic interpretation of the common PC, we leave all of the power-related options in the BIOS to their default selection. This means that for Intel-based boards, SpeedStep is left in tact. Our Windows Vista Desktop for Storage-Testing To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Storage Benchmarks. In order to get a great overall outlook on how a particular drive performs compared to the competition, we run a variety of real-world and synthetic benchmarks. As they're standard in the industry, our synthetics include PCMark Vantage, Iometer and HD Tune Pro. For our real-world tests, we use 7-Zip, Adobe Lightroom, dBpoweramp, file transfers, and also measure boot times. On the non-performance side of things, we also measure for drive temperatures, acoustics and power consumption. Each one of our tests is explained in more detail on its respective page. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: PCMark Vantage] There are few PC enthusiasts who are unfamiliar with the name "Futuremark", as the Finland-based developer has been producing quality benchmarks to help us gauge our computer's worth for years. Originally known as Madonion, Futuremark has expanded its focus to go beyond its bread and butter, graphics and gaming, and tackle other areas, such as full system performance. That's where PCMark comes into play. The company's most recent addition to the PCMark family is Vantage. For most users, a full suite would be run, but because we're focused on storage performance only, we instead run only the HDD-specific tests. Fortunately, Futuremark makes this easy for us to do as it has split up the entire suite into seven separate sub-tests, one being the aptly named "HDD Suite". PCMark's HDD Suite may look simple on the surface, but it's actually quite exhaustive. While the benchmark does deliver a simple "overall" result, it actually tests I/O performance based on a variety of scenarios, from adding music to Windows Media Player, to loading applications in succession, to editing video, to running a malware scanner, and more. It even includes metrics to evaluate a simulated Windows Vista boot time, so Futuremark has done a fine job of combining many useful scenarios into a single button press. Overall the Momentus XT scored a second place finish in Vantage testing. It scored huge wins in application loading times as well as the other read-heavy tasks. In the other tasks, it performs on par with its counterparts. One very important note to remember that the initial run for the Momentus XT was lower and each repeated run increased the score. I ran this particular test 5 times and used the 3rd run for my submitted results. The latter runs were slightly higher, but it seemed to peak out after the 3rd run...

Seagate Momentus XT 500GB

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