Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive Review

Normally with a HDD or storage device we test its out-right performance with a few read/write speed tests, we however feel that is a little unfair as this is certainly not where the Seagate drive has been designed to excel. We will still give you these performance figures first so that you can compare it with a traditional laptop HD and an SSD. For all the tests today we will be using a standard Samsung 2.5″ 5400 RPM Laptop Hard Drive which has been used in thousands of laptops to date. We will also be using an OCZ Vertex EX Series 60 GB SSD to show you the other end of the market.

We used a simple program called HD_Speed and used the same settings for all drives.

Next we are going to perform several more realistic tests, which we hope show its real-life benefits and how it could improve your everyday computing use.

First up is the windows start-up speed test, which is always something we like to see improved. As such, we will see how the Seagate Momentus XT compares with the Samsung HD and the OCZ SSD. Due to how the Seagate Momentus XT works we are expecting the boot-up times to decrease (so get better) as the drive tries to learn which files are needed more frequently than others and as such stores them in the solid-state sector.

To keep this test fair we have created a clean install on the OCZ SSD, and performed all the latest windows updates, as well as installing the standard suite of software, including Antivirus, Microsoft Office and Google Chrome and a piece of software for cloning the hard-drive.

Please Note: Seagate 1 is the first recorded boot-up of the Seagate Momentus XT drive and Seagate 2 is the second recorded boot-up etc.

Firstly, lets take a look at the more important Boot times, which clearly the OCZ SSD has the upper hand by quite a wide margin and the Samsung mechanical 5400 RPM drive was clearly in last place. However, the Seagate’s first boot-up time was a fairly impressive 42.76 seconds, but by the 8th boot-up this had dropped to a fantastic 29 seconds, which is not far behind the SSD speeds.

In terms of shut-down speeds we were slightly surprised with the results. The SSD produced blinding shut-down times, and the Samsung drive wasn’t far behind. The Seagate on the other seemed to get slower and slower the more times we turned the system on, it did however seem to average out at only 18 seconds, which is still a good speed but clearly quite a bit more than the slower drive. We can only presume this is due to the fact that the drive sometimes has to move files from the SSD sector onto the mechanical part and as such it has more files to write to the drive, which it presumably does at shut-down. That said, we can’t ignore the impressive boot-up times.

We then tested for battery life and other performance factors, and found the Seagate Momentus XT to be better than the Samsung drive, and nearly as good as our OCZ SSD. However, the Seagate does produce a little bit more noise, and seems to vibrate very slightly, which is not surprising as it is running at the faster 7200 RPM but is quite noticeable when the laptop is placed on a wooden desk for instance.