The Basics:
Our sample arrived as a bare drive, so we'll skip any discussions about the packaging and the accessories.
There isn't anything all that exciting about the appearance of the Seagate Momentus XT drive, but we'll take a quick look at it anyway. The below left image shows the top of the drive where we see the typical data label loaded up with regulatory certifications, bar codes, and of course some product specific data in plain English.
The above right image shows the bottom of the drive, and the PCB is a reminder that this isn't a solid state drive. Taking a look at the right edge of the drive we see SATA data and power connections, as well as a block which features four jumper pins.
Configuration:
The 500GB
Seagate Momentus XT drive was tested in a system with the following other components:
» Intel Core i7-920 quad-core processor
» Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R x58 Motherboard
» 6GB (3x 2GB) Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600MHz triple channel memory kit
» Nesteq Silent 700W modular power supply
» Windows 7 Pro operating system x64 (current as of May 2010)
A bootable Acronis disk was used to clone an existing installation of Windows 7 Pro on to each drive to be used in this review. Once booted into Windows for the first time I loaded CrystalDiskInfo 3.5.6 to confirm some of the drive's key features. We get confirmation of the overall capacity (500GB), but to the outside world there will be no indication of the 4GB SSD component. We also see the 7200RPM rotational speed is listed, but the software was unable to confirm the 32MB of cache memory.
Test Setup:
The testing portion of the review will have the Momentus XT matched up against one solid state drive and one traditional 2.5" SATA hard drive, as detailed below.
» 320GB Western Digital Scorpio " 2.5” 5400RPM [
review link]
» 60GB OCZ Technology Agility MLC SSD [
review link]
Some special considerations had to be made for testing the
Seagate Momentus XT to its fullest, so we'll cover a bunch of the testing criteria before getting to the actual tests:
1. All drives were formatted with one partition equal to the maximum capacity.
2. The Windows 7 Pro (x64) operating system was cloned to each drive using Acronis True Image.
3. Reference drive specific notes:
a. Each drive was tested once with each benchmark.
b. The system was rebooted between each benchmark.
4. Seagate Hybrid Drive specific notes:
a. Each benchmark was conducted 5 times total to test the adaptive learning capabilities.
b. The value from each run was recorded, as well as an average of the 5 runs.
c. The 5 test runs on each benchmark were executed so that 3 test runs would be conducted, the
system would be rebooted, and 2 more runs would then be conducted.
d. Between test runs 1-2, 2-3, and 4-5, the test application would simply be closed, re-launched,
and then executed again.
e. Aside from the one reboot, the 5 test runs of each benchmark were executed consecutively
with no other user initiated system activity.
f. After the 5 tests run were conducted for each benchmark, the system was rebooted before
starting the next benchmark.
g. For the sake of brevity, the results from just the first and the last (fifth) test runs were
recorded in each graph, as well as the average of all five test runs
