Real World Performance:

With the Windows 7 Event Viewer you can accurately evaluate boot times. It takes the human component out of making sure a timer is set and stopped at the same times. The Event Viewer will provide a boot time from the point that the Windows logo appears until the CPU is at 80% idle, which is when it is considered a truly usable state. Here the lower score is better as it relates to time it takes to boot.



While it took several reboots to allow the Momentus XT to cache the boot files, once it did, the performance was greatly increased. Once again it was unable to match the performance of a high quality SSD, it did boot much faster than both the Seagate drives; cutting off more than 7 seconds. This is where the Seagate Momentus XT really started to shine and show what it is capable of.

Photoshop CS4 Startup Time:

Photoshop always seems to take a long time to start up. As this chart shows, after the Seagate Momentus XT caches Photoshop, the speed to start it up is greatly enhanced. It took 3 seconds off from the similar 2.5" Seagate drive. While that doesn't sound like a lot, there is close to 4 seconds difference between the normal 2.5" Seagate Momentus and the SSDs. Which means the Momentus XT was around 1 second slower at starting up Photoshop when compared to the SSDs.