| Forum Home | ||||
| PC World Chat | ||||
| Thread ID: 113514 | 2010-10-23 07:05:00 | Seagate Momentus XT = AWESOME | ryanjames.powell (13554) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1147072 | 2010-10-23 07:05:00 | Just thought I would share an opinion of a recent purchase. I bought a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT for my laptop the other day. This is a hybrid 7200RPM hard drive with a 4GB SSD built in, which caches commonly used data on the fly (eg files used to start the computer). I have had my Toshiba Satellite U500 (Core i5 Dual Core M520 @ 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM) for about 8 months now, and have always thought that it was terribly slow for its specs. It was originally specced with a 500GB Toshiba MK5055GSX running at 5400RPM. It took over 3 minutes from pressing the on button to being even remotely usable, and apps started quite slowly compared to similarly specced desktops. So at first I tried disabling the page file, as I don't really need it with so much RAM. This improved things somewhat, I shaved about 30 seconds off the startup time, which indicated to me that the hard drive was indeed the bottleneck here, and some online research indicated that it was a reasonably slow drive, even for a 5400RPM. I spotted the Momentus XT on Playtech's site a few weeks ago, did some reading, which indicated that in some tests it could outperform a 10,000RPM Western Digital VelociRaptor. I finally talked myself into spending the $209 the other day, and what a difference. I'm now down to sub-1 minute 15 second startup times and my apps are wonderfully snappy. It takes a few startups (I hit the optimum speed after about 3 or 4 restarts) for the drive to cache the right data, but boy does it make a huge difference. The laptop is now the high performance machine it should be, or at least, as good as you'll get without spending several hundred dollars on a full SSD which would have nowhere near the capacity. My only question now is: Toshiba, why did you not spec this laptop with at least a 7200RPM drive in the first place? Sure, it's a 13" laptop, but it hardly prioritizes battery life with it's reasonably grunty processor, dedicated graphics and backlit keyboard. |
ryanjames.powell (13554) | ||
| 1147073 | 2010-10-23 20:16:00 | You didn't need to go to a hybrid drive to get the performance increase. I upgraded my Asus from a 320GB 5400 HDD to a 500GB 7200 HDD (both Seagate) and got very similar results to yours. |
johcar (6283) | ||
| 1147074 | 2010-10-23 20:57:00 | "...This is a hybrid 7200RPM hard drive with a 4GB SSD built in" It sounds like a great idea. Maybe someone will buy me one of these drives for Christmas. |
rumpty (2863) | ||
| 1147075 | 2010-10-23 21:17:00 | $200 for 500GB! Personally since it's a laptop I'll just buy an Intel X25-V, but that's just me, cause I don't really need too much space for my laptop. | qazwsxokmijn (102) | ||
| 1147076 | 2010-10-25 19:23:00 | $200 for 500GB! Personally since it's a laptop I'll just buy an Intel X25-V, but that's just me, cause I don't really need too much space for my laptop. I need the space. |
ryanjames.powell (13554) | ||
| 1147077 | 2010-10-25 19:26:00 | You didn't need to go to a hybrid drive to get the performance increase. I upgraded my Asus from a 320GB 5400 HDD to a 500GB 7200 HDD (both Seagate) and got very similar results to yours. Since it is just a normal Momentus 7200RPM with double the cache and a different PCB with the 4GB flash on it, it should offer identical performance to the normal Momentus on the first boot (ie before any caching to the flash happens). The first boot was still quite slow for me, and it improved drastically over the next few times I booted, which proves I gained a lot from the hybrid. |
ryanjames.powell (13554) | ||
| 1 | |||||