Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive Review

HD Tach v3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Segate Momentus 7200.4 500GB:

Segate Momentus XT 500GB:

Benchmark Results: The Seagate Momentus XT looks much better and has smoother performance than the original Seagate Momentus 7200.4 that we looked at last year. The Seagate Momentus XT was able to reach 91MB/s read and 86MB/s write. The random access time was at 16.6ms with a CPU usage of just 1%. The burst speed of this SATA II drive was also observed as being a respectable 248MB/s!

Comparison Chart: The Seagate Momentus XT doesn’t really compete with enthusiast 3.5″ hard drives like the Western Digital VelociRaptor or any of the SSDs in this benchmark. Remember that the Momentus XT uses adaptive memory technology and this benchmark doesn’t take advantage of this technology since it uses low level drive commands. The Seagate Momentus XT does look better than the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 due to what is likely firmware improvements.