Seagate Momentus XT – SSD for the common man

I recently had a discussion with my good friend Eric Moreau about solid state drives (SSD).  I was saying that although I’d love have the performance boost of a SSD drive, the thought of having a $500 SSD drive in a $800 laptop was simply not right for me.  A few days later, he sent me a link to a blog post by Jeff Atwood where he writes about a new and affordable hybrid drive from Seagate, the Seagate Momentus XT.

What’s cool about this series is that Seagate added a small 4GB NAND chip to their Momentus 2.5” laptop drives that act as a cache for the files that you access more frequently.

So I started searching the InterWeb a found a bunch of great reviews (Engadget, Tom’s Hardware, AnandTech) so I decided to pay a visit to my local MicroBytes store to buy one.  These things must be selling like hotcakes because I ask the guy at the counter “Do you have the Seagate Momen. . .” and he cut me asking if I’d like the 320GB or the 500GB!

After cloning my hard drive with Acronis True Image, I switched the drives and did a series of 3 reboots so that the drive would “learn” what files to place on the SSD portion.  The verdict?  It’s definitively faster then my old 7200RPM drive.  Booting, waking from hibernation and starting Outlook a lot faster.  I now have to teach it to cache Visual Studio  ;-)

This is a very good compromise between price and performance and definitively a must buy.  Highly recommended!