Seagate embiggens hybrid drive, won't say how... Seagate has speeded up its Momentus XT flash/disk hybrid, making it nearly 70 per cent faster than the existing model. The Momentus XT, a 2.5-inch, solid state hybrid drive (SSHD), had a 4GB NAND cache and Adaptive Memory technology to track often-used files and move them into flash, thus facilitating faster O/S boot and …
'Tis a great idea for games. I have a proper SSD for my boot drive but given the size of games these days they are all stored on magnetic drives. Having a hybrid drive for games should speed up the load screens considerably for games you play often without breaking the bank. Notice the prices have massively gone up recently though so won't be buying one for a while.
I got the older 500Gb version and yes it is certainly faster than a normal drive on some things, I also found it unreliable. My computer would just freeze or other software just played up. It was due to a problem with the drive going into sleep mode.
I did update the firmware on it, but it made no difference, which is why I went and got myself a SDD and now the seagate is the second drive and it is fine as that
Article indicates they are, then in the next sentence Seagate denies it. I'd consider one of these if it sped up writes, but if it is just adding 8GB of flash cache that only works for reads it is basically a one trick pony to speed up boot times, which is useless unless you boot up constantly. Otherwise just add 8GB of RAM to your PC and you'll cache all your frequently used files just as well as this product and for a smaller price premium.
My understanding is that the flash on these hybrid drives is only used for caching reads. The drive just copies commonly read sectors to the flash.
You will see improvements outside of booting though, such as loading commonly used programs. Particularly if you open and close the programs more than you boot up since the drive will learn that you hit those areas far more often.
Plus with 8GB of flash on these newer ones, they'd fit the files used during boot and a collection of your most used software (web browser?).
"cannot be arsed reading so what specs did the original laptop have?"
So you can't be arsed to read, you want someone else to read the article and tell you what you want to know so that you can just say it's crap - great let me quickly summarise the article for you with easy placed headers etc... oh no I can't be arsed!
Where do you fill that cache up from? Does Cache remember your frequently used programs across reboots, does it store all the executables to run a program in your RAM or do you mean create a RAM drive and write a script to copy the data from the hard disk across each bootup, that you check every week or so to make sure it is being filled with the required data?
I have the old model in my Mac. Bloody marvellous it is. Only complaint is that it likes to park itself from time to time to "conserve" energy and you can't turn this off. But loading times on stuff you use on a regular basis is much reduced.
Hope these new drives aren't as hard to get hold of as my drive was.
I want!!
With my 1st gen Momentus I get performance close to that of my old Vertex SSD but with enough room for actually storing data, Im not sure of the focus on booting all the time, I only tend to reboot if an update requires it - 15 seconds (after bios) to resume from hibernate, or 3 seconds to recover from sleep are my usual working day powercycles
I wonder if they will tweak and update the firmware for the first gen?
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