Price: $245



Introduction:

Over the past couple of years the Solid State Hard Drive has been chipping away at the market traditionally dominated by mechanical platter equipped hard disk drives. The performance of Solid State Drives for the most part has far out paced that of mechanical drives with spindle speeds of up to 10,000RPM. The stellar performance curve delivered by the Solid State Drive is not without its own liabilities in terms of longevity, cost and capacity. Seagate has been working to overcome the liabilities of the mechanical drive and have delivered several generations of hybrid drives that incorporate a small amount of robust SLC NAND coupled with a larger capacity mechanical drive. By using the NAND as a means to cache frequently used programs the access time to the most frequently used programs are significantly reduced without the cost of a full on Solid State drive. Seagate's newest Momentus XT Hybrid 750GB drive is the next generation of this technology that is improved with new FAST (Flash Assisted Storage) algorithms to generate Solid State drive performance for an improved user experience . Improvements include a bump in the capacity by 50%, doubling of the data connection speed, a 100% increase in the SLC NAND and improved system responsiveness. Cost for the 750GB ST750LX003 Hybrid drive is set at $245.

Closer Look:

Externally the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 750GB drive looks much like any standard 2.5 inch form factor mechanical hard drive from any manufacturer. Internally is where the differences and FAST technologies from Seagate are put to work. The Momentus 750GB ST750LX003 Hybrid drive as implied is 750GB in capacity, has a 7300RPM spindle speed, 32MB of cache, four heads, two platters and 8GB of SLC NAND flash memory. The interface has moved from a a SATA 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s NCQ interface for this third generation drive.

Hosting an improved feature set across the board the Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid drive looks to offer a significant boost in system responsiveness and SSD like performance. The key is how it will perform. Admittedly synthetic benchmarks will not show off the drive to its full potential, as in most, it will perform just like a standard 7200RPM drive.