Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid Drive Intro
Seagate’s first Momentus XT hybrid drive arrived about a year and a half ago. The original drive featured a 500GB hard drive paired to 4GB of SLC NAND flash and a SATA 3.0 interface. At the time of its release, the original Momentus XT turned out to be a rather compelling product. Its price was relatively low and Seagate’s adaptive memory technology “just worked”, which resulted in increased performance that was seamless to the end-user, regardless of the OS being used.
Today Seagate is ready to reveal its next iteration of the Momentus XT. The updated version of the drive we’ll be showing you here today features a 750GB storage capacity, with 8GB of SLC NAND flash, and a faster SATA 6.0Gbps interface. Much of the underlying technology is similar, but this new drive has more magnetic storage, more flash memory, a speedier interface, and its adaptive memory algorithms and hybrid data management tools--dubbed Fast Factor--have been tweaked for better real-world performance versus the original. Full specifications are below, with a performance profile to follow...
Seagate’s first Momentus XT hybrid drive arrived about a year and a half ago. The original drive featured a 500GB hard drive paired to 4GB of SLC NAND flash and a SATA 3.0 interface. At the time of its release, the original Momentus XT turned out to be a rather compelling product. Its price was relatively low and Seagate’s adaptive memory technology “just worked”, which resulted in increased performance that was seamless to the end-user, regardless of the OS being used.
Today Seagate is ready to reveal its next iteration of the Momentus XT. The updated version of the drive we’ll be showing you here today features a 750GB storage capacity, with 8GB of SLC NAND flash, and a faster SATA 6.0Gbps interface. Much of the underlying technology is similar, but this new drive has more magnetic storage, more flash memory, a speedier interface, and its adaptive memory algorithms and hybrid data management tools--dubbed Fast Factor--have been tweaked for better real-world performance versus the original. Full specifications are below, with a performance profile to follow...
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The Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Drive
Although Seagate hasn’t revealed all of the secret-sauce that makes the Momentus XT unique in the current market, understanding how the drive works is fairly straightforward. The 8GB of SLC NAND flash is used as a high-speed repository of sorts. The controller on the Momentus XT monitors usage patterns and copies the most frequently accessed bits of data from the hard drive to the solid state storage. And it all happens independent of the OS or drivers. According to Seagate, the data on the hard drives has to be accessed multiple times before it is copied to the solid state storage and the contents of the flash memory will dynamically and constantly change over time, based on usage. To put it simply, the most commonly accessed data on the platters gets copied to the much higher performing, SLC Flash memory, which results in a performance boost. And it’s not necessarily full files being copied, but rather the most frequently accessed bits of data. We should also point out that a new feature to the updated Momentus XT called Fast Boot uses a small portion of the solid state cache for data used during the boot process, which resides in a special location and won't change often, in order to maintain quick boot times.
Knowing how the adaptive memory on the Momentus XT works, reveals one of the drawbacks of a hybrid design such as this one—the flash memory will offer no performance benefit to infrequently accessed or new data. So, with large file copies, application installations, and the like, the Momentus XT will perform like a standard HD.
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Hard Drives - |
Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-2600K Asus P8Z6-V Pro (Z68 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 4GB Kingston DDR3-1600 Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Seagate Momentus XT Seagate 7200.10 500GB + Intel 311 OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid (1TB) Crucial M4 (256) |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64 Intel 9.2.0.1030, iRST 10.5.1027 DirectX 11 NVIDIA GeForce 275.33 Benchmarks Used: ATTO v2.47 CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64 PCMark 7 |
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ATTO is a "quick and dirty" type of disk
benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length.
It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs
them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb
transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of
256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw
bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc. This test
was performed on blank, formatted drives with default NTFS partitions
in Windows 7 x64.
The new Seagate Momentus XT offered better performance across the board in comparison to the original Momentus XT and was also faster than the HD integrated into the RevoHybrid. The standard SSD was much faster, however, as was the RevoHybrid when its solid-state cache comes into play.
CrystalDiskMark
is a synthetic benchmark that tests both sequential and random small
and mid-sized file transfers. It provides a quick look at best and worst
case scenarios with regard to SSD performance, best case being larger
sequential transfers and worse case being small, random transfers.
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The numbers show the new Momentus XT 750GB drive offering about 10% better hard drive performance than the original Momentus XT. Intels' SRT technology, the standalone SSD, and the RevoHybrid once again offer better performance--as expected.
We really like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement of system response times under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system operation. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of SSDs in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, more so than a purely synthetic transfer test.
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PCMark 7's storage benchmark, due to its psuedo-real-world workloads, does show the benefits of Seagate's adaptive memory technology. We ran this test three times to illustrate how the Momentus XT's performance scales from run to run as its solid state cache comes into play. The test was run multiple times on the other hybrid solutions as well, and the results from their third runs are reported here. The other hybrid solutions, however, offered somewhat better performance in most of the tests.
As you can see, the Momentus XT's performance scales significantly as its solid state cache is utilized and the drive offers performance much better than a standard 7200RPM hard drive.
source:hothardware.com
