Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Drives Coming Soon
Trying for glory a second time, Seagate is very soon to announce a hybrid solid state and spinning disk drive, the Momentus XT, with no operating system dependencies. It marries a 2.5-inch, 7200 rpm 250, 320 or 500GB, 3Gbit/s SATA hard disk drive (HDD) with a 4GB solid state drive (SSD), presumably a Seagate Pulsar drive, with data cached in the SSD using a so-called Adaptive Memory algorithm. This monitors data transfers to and from the drive, starting when it’s first installed and booted up, and copies the most active files and data into the SSD.
It continually does this and, says Mark Wojtasiak, a Seagate senior product marketing manager: “On the second boot it knows about 80 per cent of your activity and you’ll see dramatic increases in the speed of boot, application load and so forth. By the third boot it’s nearly 100 per cent there.” Over time as your activity profile changes so do the contents of the SSD. He said that all writes go the hard drive first so that, should the SSD ever fail, the data is still on the drive. The SSD uses single-level cell NAND and Seagate has tested it for five years’ worth of use and not seen any loss of performance. It is a second-level cache as there is a 32MB DRAM cache which, Seagate says, improves write I/O speed with the SSD greatly increasing read I/O speed. The caching operations do not require any support from the host operating system, a requirement which derailed the previous Seagate Momentus PSD drives of 2006 and 2007. They linked a 256MB SSD cache to the spinning disk and relied on Windows Vista making good use of the pair. It didn’t.
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