Review: Seagate Momentus XT

Storage maker Seagate continues to develop hybrid hard drives, which boost performance, affordability and capacity by combining solid-state and mechanical technology.

PC World reviewed the first-generation 500GB Momentus XT last year, and overall, that drive provided very good bang for buck. Now, Seagate has released a bigger, 750GB Momentus XT variant that has further improvements such as twice the SSD cache (4GB), 6Gbps SATA 3 support, 4,096 bytes per sector instead of 512, and the company’s FAST Factor Boot and Flash Management technologies.

The FAST tech means part of the single-level cell solid-state memory is portioned off for storing operating system boot files for SSD-like performance. Other than that, the drive spins at 7,200rpm, uses a 32MB cache and comes in 2.5-inch form factor. It doesn’t require any special drivers and will fit into standard laptop disc bays.

Seagate claims the drive boots and performs like an SSD, but that’s an exaggeration. The drive is plenty fast, coming close to the mighty OCZ Vertex 3 in some PCMark 7 tests. However, with a 15ms access time it can’t keep up with SSDs that are a hundred times quicker, and the read and write figures in benchmarks like Atto and HDTune hit 112 to 115Mbyte/s maximum. That’s on par with quick desktop drives, but the OCZ Vertex 3 almost saturates the 6Gbps SATA channel with 550Mbyte/s reads.

In real-world scenarios, the ST750XL003 performs very well and once it figured out which boot files to store, brought up Windows 7 (64-bit) in 27-29 seconds, and shut it down in 4-6 seconds. Now that’s SSD-like performance, and compared to the older Momentus drive, a healthy 30% improvement in most areas; the single downgrade is 1.1 Watts higher power consumption compared to the older drive, at 3.3 Watts when working.

A five-year warranty is excellent but the value proposition of the drive is hard to work out as the Thailand floods last year caused storage pricing to go through the roof. The ST750XL003 can be found for $385 inc. GST or nearly twice as much as last year’s Momentus, which hasn’t gone up in price and is a good performer too.

The ST750XL003 is a very good drive that lives up to some of the hype, but budget conscious shoppers would do well to wait for prices to drop.