Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Preview

Next we ran the three drives through a battery of tests in PCMark Vantage from Futuremark Corp. We specifically used only the HDD Test module of this benchmark suite to evaluate all of the drives we tested. Feel free to consult Futuremark's white paper on PCMark Vantage for an understanding of what each test component entails and how it calculates its measurements. For specific information on how the HDD Test module arrives at its performance measurements, we'd encourage you to read pages 35 and 36 of the white paper.

Futuremark's PCMark Vantage http://www.futuremark.com

We really like PCMark Vantage's HDD Performance for its real-world application measurement approach to testing.  From simple Windows Vista start-up performance to data streaming from a disk drive in a game engine and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel confident that these tests best illustrate the real performance profile of our SSDs in an end user/consumer PC usage model.

Here is where things start to get really interesting. The HDD Test suite incorporated into PCMark Vantage represent a pseudo-real world secenario with which the Momentus XT's adaptive memory technology can be exploited. In this graph and the one on the next page, there are two sets of results for the Momentus XT representing the first and third runs of the benchmark on the drive.

As you can see, in the first run, where the Momentus XT hasn't had a chance to adapt to the workload, it performs somewhat better than the WD Scorpio Blue. By the third run, however, the Momentus XT had adapted and its performace skyrockets as a result.