Conclusion:

The Seagate 750GB Momentus XT hard drive is a fairly typical 7200RPM hard drive that has been optimized with 8GB of flash memory cache. After Seagate's Adaptive Memory technology learns what data to move into the cache, those tasks execute much faster than on a typical hard drive. The downside is that anything that is not moved into the cache runs as if it were on a standard hard drive. The most noticeable performance increase was from booting Windows. While still not as fast as a SSD, the drive was noticeably faster than a standard hard drive.



Many people that want a truly high speed drive in their system have probably moved onto a SSD for their boot drive and use other storage for their data. In the consumer market there are still plenty of laptops that are sold with space for a single traditional 2.5" hard drive, and those would be the perfect target for the Seagate Momentus XT. Providing a performance boost along with the storage capacity of a standard drive can help extend the usefull and enjoyability of those laptops. When possible, I would recommend looking at using a SSD for the operating system and applications, and moving data onto a secondary hard drive. If that is not possible due to cost or the laptop's configuration, then the Seagate Momentus XT is the best option for increasing the performance.

The only downside to the Momentus XT is that it only caches what you use the most. If you happen to use many applications, video files, databases, it probably won't help with that. However, the speed increase of starting up the operating system and applications, easily takes that downside away.

If the performance and capacity wasn't enough reason to purchase this drive, the price should help. It can be found online for as low as $129 (US) at Newegg.com, which makes it a little more pricey than a comparable standard 2.5" drive. However, then you're not getting the potential increase in boot up time and application launch performance!

Given the fast read/write speeds, high capacity, and reasonable cost, the Seagate 750GB Momentus XT hybrid drive earns the Bigbruin.com "Highly Recommended" and "Great Idea" awards.



Pros:

» Large Capacity
» Speeds up booting and commonly used applications
» Reasonably priced for what the performance increase

Cons:

» 9.7mm high
» Not quite as effective as SSD

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