Upgrade Kit Performance:

The software was a pleasant surprise, it was fast and very easy to use. It runs from the disc, so there is no software to install. This is especially nice as it means that you won't have additional un-needed software installed after the upgrade is finished. One way to make it nicer would be to make the disc bootable into Windows PE or some other basic OS.

Making a copy of the boot drive, the Intel 520 180GB drive, in the test system to the Seagate Momentus XT took 43 Minutes and 15 Seconds (which can be seen in the last picture of the previous section). During the process, I kept an eye on the speed that it was reporting and it stayed between 27MB/s and 31MB/s; the drive copy finished at 28.9MB/s.



System Configuration:

The following hardware will be used to test the Seagate 750GB Momentus XT hybrid drive:

» AMD 1090T 3.2GHz processor
» Thermaltake Frio CPU cooler
» 16GB Kingston HyperX Blu 1600MHz DDR3 memory
» ASUS GTX 560Ti video card
» LG Blu-Ray burner
» Vantec EZ Swap F4 Four Bay 2.5" SATA SSD/HDD Rack
» Intel 520 180GB solid state drive
» OCZ Vertex 4 256GB solid state drive
» Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive
» Seagate 2 x 7200.12 1.0TB hard drive
» Corsair CS600 power supply
» Windows 7 Ultimate



As far as the installation goes, if you have ever installed any hard drives, nothing will surprise you here. Secure the drive to your system as necessary, connect the SATA data and power connections, and the drive is ready to go.