If you’re searching for the fastest hard drive with a huge capacity for your laptop, it’s time for you to learn about the new Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid drive. After the success of the first generation hybrid drive in the form of XT 500GB, with more than a Million sold around the world, Seagate came out with the second generation hybrid drive but this time it’s faster and bigger.
Benefits Of Hybrid Drive
Hybrid drive is the fusion of SSD’s and HDD. The HDD plays the bigger part of it as it offers a huge storage capacity and the SSD is only partial that promotes a faster data access. The idea behind this is to give you a fast with moderate size drive in a single package, this is something that the SSD is limited to. As a result, with the Seagate Momentus XT 750GB you got somewhere in between.
Seagate promises a boost in its performance up to 1.5X with this new drive compared to the previous one. An additional 50 percent in its size is clearly visible, from 500GB and now jump to 750GB. But what else do we expect from this? The Seagate Momentus XT 750GB has so much to offer, such as faster interface, larger SSD and more features.
What Makes It Fast?
Seagate managed to stick with this new drive at 7,200rpm platter speed and 32MB cache size. Adding to its new feature is a faster interface with SATA 6GB/s that eliminates the bottle neck in transferring data’s. No need to worry if you only do have a SATA 3GB/s because it’s fully compatible but, we can expect a bit downgrade.
Another good thing here is that, it doubles the SSD size. From a small 4GB previously now you got an 8GB of SLC NAND memory. It doesn’t end up right there, in fact the real goodness here is the new technology Seagate’s employs in which they called the “FAST Factor”(Flash-Assisted Storage Technology). This feature is almost the same as the previous version which is the Adaptive Memory Technology.
This gives the drives ability to identify the data usage patterns in which the most frequently accessed is moved to NAND memory for faster retrieval. The second generation FAST Factor has the advantage of retaining the boot data on the 8GB NAND thus, further speeds up the booting time. Another thing is that, the Flash memory is used more often in reading data than writing for a longer life span.
The Magic Of The Hybrid Drive
Transferring files is one of the basic PC operations hp ryzen 3 in our daily usage, copying small files is noticeably fast but, when dealing with a large file, this is where we can see how good the hard drive is. The Momentus XT perform as a regular 7,200rpm drive in copying files, the SSD part of it doesn’t facilitate.
The magic of the hybrid drive works best when dealing with the most frequently accessed data’s. Most of us don’t have the patience to wait for a longer boot up time for the OS and other lengthy programs such as Adobe CS5. This is what the Momentus XT is made of the FAST Factor feature usefulness here is definitely noticeable.
Even during at the first boot it’s surprisingly fast, improvements over the first generation XT 500GB is clearly seen with 4 seconds faster. This is way ahead compared to the non hybrid drive such as the VelociRaptor 300GB.
Conclusion
The Seagate Momentus XT 750 is an excellent choice if you’re thinking for an upgrade for your laptop hard drive. It’s biggest drawback is in copying files, it performs merely the same as the normal hard drive; having the hybrid SSD in it is almost useless. However, at 7,200rpm it can beat the fast 10,00rpm VelociRaptor making it the best contender for the fastest hard drive of today.
The applications it excels the most is in loading programs especially Windows OS in which it really hit the nerves of most enthusiast alike. This is ideal in any laptop that doesn’t provide an additional bay for a second drive, also perfect in desktop PC that requires moderate disk space. By doubling it and configured in RAID 0, you got a beast rig at hand.
The retail price for the Momentus XT 750GB is equivalent to 120GB SSD out there in which you got 6X more disk space; this is something that I consider a bargain price level. Overall, this is definitely a solid drive with small flaws in copying large files, but absolutely fast in loading programs.