Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Review

Seagate has been one of the popular brands as far as computer peripherals and accessories are concerned. Recently the company announced their Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drives in capacities of 250GB, 320GB, 500GB and 750GB. With SSDs and HDDs in the market, these Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs) aim to get the best of both worlds. Let’s have a look at how the Momentux XT 750GB performs.

The Momentus XT

Design and Features

The Momentus XT looks like any other laptop drive. It doesn’t have much to boast of, and anyway, internal drives are more about performance, than design. From the 750GB of memory, 698GB is available to the user and the disk runs at 7200 rpm with 32 MB of cache memory. This hybrid drive aims to give you the speeds comparable to SSDs with capacities closer to HDDs. Let’s have a look at the real world performance in the next section 

Best of both worlds?

Performance

We put the XT through its paces in our synthetic and real world tests. In SiSoft Sandra, the drive got a drive index of 93 MB/s at a random access time of 14.67ms. The write performance was 82 MB/s with 10.57ms as the random access time. CrystalDiskMark 3.0 gave a sequential read and write score of 115 MB/s. Random 512KB read gave a speed of 57.39 MB/s, while a Random 4K QD32 write got a speed of 2.199 MB/s. In HDTach, we got an average read speed of 97.7 MB/s and a burst speed of 456.6 MB/s

In our real world test, the Momentus got a pretty good sequential read speed of 105 MB/s, while transferring 4GB of data. Random write speeds got a score of 95 MB/s. Interpartition speeds had a respectable score, too. The complete results are given below. 

The real world scores

Verdict

The Seagate Momentus XT is priced at 10,000 + taxes (MOP). It’s a neat performer, as there’s a good balance between capacity and speed. Currently 500GB HDDs for laptops are retailing at a price tag of approximately  6,000 and keeping that in mind, the XT may be just a couple of grands above the bar. For that price though, you're getting a much better performance than your average HDD. If you're on the lookout for a 750GB high perfomance drive, then the Momentus XT is definitely worth a look.