Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Preview

Name: Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Preview - Page 3
Brand: Seagate

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, May 24, 2010, 08:00 AM EDT

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. The SSDs were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, Vantage, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. And all drives were secure erased prior to the start of any testing. 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.

HotHardware Test System

Intel Core i7 Powered

Processor -

Motherboard -

Video Card -

Memory -

Audio -

Hard Drives -

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7 965

Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme
(X58 Express Chipset)

GeForce GTX 280

6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333
CAS 7

Integrated on board

Seagate Momentus XT 500GB
Seagate 7200.11 1.5GB
WD Scorpio Blue 750GB
Patriot Memory Zephyr 128GB

OS -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -

Video Drivers -

Relevant Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate
Intel 9.1.1.1025 w/ Matrix Storage
DirectX 11

NVIDIA ForceWare v196.34

Benchmarks Used:
HD Tach v3.0.1.0
ATTO v2.46
CrystalDiskMark v3
PCMark Vantage
SiSoftware Sandra 2010 SP1

IOMeter

I/O Subsystem Measurement

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns with IOMeter; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access. Both tests were conducted with 8 worker threades.

The adaptive memory technology of the Seagate Momentus XT doesn't seem to adapt to the workloads presented by IOMeter, as is evidenced by the similarity in the results between the first and third runs, but the drive does perform well, relative to the other hard drives we tested. With both the default and our workstation access patterns, the Momentus XT finishes well out in front of the other hard drives we tested. The SSD, however, dominates all around.

Tags: Seagate, SSD, HD, Storage, Hybrid, SATA, drive, solid state, momentus

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com