Seagate's Momentus XT is a 2.5" notebook drive of a
half-Terabyte in capacity that stands out from the crowd because
it contains 4GB of SLC NAND flash. The NAND flash is used as sort of a 'fast
access repository' to store commonly used data, though at 4GB,
the SSD portion of this hybrid drive accounts for only 0.8% of its total storage capacity.
The two platter, 7200RPM Seagate Momentus XT posts an
average read latency of 11.0ms, write 13.0ms. Seagate's 3Gb/s SATA II
ST95005620AS drive retails for round $156USD and requires no special drivers or
software so it can be used in Intel and AMD systems, Mac and PC platforms.
Additional Momentus XT drives are available in 250GB and 320GB capacities, all
drives feature NCQ and low power requirements of 1.5W or less.
Cornerstone of Seagate's hybrid Momentus XT SSHD,
Adaptive Memory is tasked with learning what data you frequently use
and caching it to the 4GB internal flash memory. When
this qualified data is called the next time, Adaptive Memory kicks in
and instead of waiting for the data to be read off relatively slow hard
drive platters, it's retrieved instantly from the NAND flash. Seagate
aims to deliver like-SSD responsiveness from the Momentus XT part in
parcel with the inexpensive economics of HDD-based storage. A very narrow
goal that unfortunately doesn't address one of the other benefits of native
SSD technology - fast writes.
Over the next few pages PCSTATS will be testing out
Seagate's 500GB Momentus XT SSHD to see how well the drive operates in a variety of standard hard drive
benchmarks, let's begin!
 |
|
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB
Hybrid Drive |
|
|
|
|
|
Model: Seagate
ST95005620AS
Type: Solid State Hybrid
Drive |
|
Capacity: 500GB (7200RPM,
two-platters)
Interface: 3Gb/s SATA II /
NCQ
Adaptive Memory: 4GB SLC NAND
Flash
Standard Drive Cache:
32MB
MSRP
Price: $156
USD
| |
| |
Seagate's Momentus XT uses an algorithm to continually monitor
and qualify frequently accessed data and LBA bits
for duplication in the embedded 4GB SLC NAND flash. The algorithm generally takes three
or four iterations before optimal results are seen. For example, the difference between the first run
of PCMark Vantage HDD Test Suite and the four run of this same benchmark
is quite
substantial; Overall score increases from 4024 to 6298.
See the results yourself in the chart below.
 |
Initial Run
(OS on test
disk) |
Run
2
|
Run 3 |
Run 4 |
|
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB SSHD |
| - Futuremark PCMark Vantage - Hard Drive Test
Suite |
|
|
| Overall PCMark Vantage HDD Score: |
4024 |
5920 |
6191 |
6298 |
| Windows Defender: (MB/s) |
21.3 |
27.7 |
30.8 |
32.6 |
| Gaming: (MB/s) |
16.8 |
33.9 |
38.2 |
36.0 |
| Import Pictures: (MB/s) |
42.1 |
53.1 |
48.6 |
51.7 |
| Windows Startup: (MB/s) |
18.5 |
29.7 |
31.3 |
32.0 |
| Video Editing: (MB/s) |
28.7 |
31.6 |
31.6 |
30.5 |
| Windows Media: (MB/s) |
59.6 |
61.4 |
60.8 |
61.7 |
| Adding Music WMP: (MB/s) |
6.3 |
12.2 |
12.9 |
13.0 |
| Application Loading: (MB/s) |
5.0 |
9.4 |
11.6 |
11.4 |
|
|
|
|
| |
The achilles heel to Seagate's technology is that it
does nothing for random data or programs
and files which are infrequently accessed. As you'll see
momentarily, hard drive benchmarks which utilize synthetic
data are completely uninfluenced by Adaptive Memory.
Alright, let's power up the 500GB Momentus XT SSHD and
test it!.
Test System Specs:
The
details of how the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT solid
state hybrid hard drive test system was configured for benchmarking, including
the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark
versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs
for the reference platforms this SATA II hard drive is to be compared
against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations
before moving on to the individual benchmark results.
|
| PCSTATS Test System Specs |
|
test system |
| processor:
|
intel Core i7 920
(45nm) |
| Clock
Speed: |
20 x 133 MHz = 2.67 GHz |
| Socket: |
Socket LGA1366 |
| Motherboard: |
- Intel X58
-
Gigabyte G1.Assassin |
| Videocard: |
ASUS ENGTS250
DK
(Geforce GTS250) |
| Memory: |
3x 2GB Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D DDR3 |
| Memory
Speed: |
DDR3-1066 |
| Storage: |
- HDD
74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 (3GB/s SATA
II)
1TB Western Digital 1TB WD1001FALS (3GB/s SATA II)
2TB
Seagate 2TB Barracuda XT (3GB/s SATA II)
-
SSD
120GB OCZ Vertex2 (3GB/s SATA II)
Plextor PX-128M1S
(3GB/s SATA II)
- SSHD
500GB
Seagate Momentus XT SSHD (3GB/s SATA II)
|
| Optical
Drive: |
Plextor PX-B310U
Blu-Ray |
| Power
Supply: |
Seasonic SS-760KM
(760W) |
| Heatsink: |
Intel Reference LGA1366 Heatsink |
| Monitor
(1080p): |
ASUS MK241
24" HD LCD |
| Software Setup: |
Microsoft
Windows 7 Ultimate
Intel INF 9.2.0.1025
nVIDIA Forceware
266.58 | |
|
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