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Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD Review
07.08.10 05:21 PM Filed in: Gear Reviews
It’s hard to buy a new hard drive these days, and not feel somewhat cheated. On one hand, traditional hard drives have never been cheaper. But on the other, their performance is completely eclipsed by solid state drives. It seems like you have two choices - pay outrageous amounts of money for little space and bleeding edge performance, or get a cheap drive with ample space that will be the bottleneck in your system performance. Neither is a great option.
Seagate is trying to make its own path with the Momentus XT Hybrid SSD. It’s a clever concept - a traditional 7200 RPM drive with 4 gigs of an ultra-fast SLC SSD built in. It memorizes what programs you use the most, and loads it into the read-only part of the drive.
One notable reviewer lauded it, proclaiming “finally a good hybrid SSD!” The problem is, this high-profile reviewer measured it on a Windows system. The AppleNinja got her hands on it, and found it strongly DECREASED her system speed in OSX. Read more to get the gritty details of why Mac users should not buy this drive.
Seagate is trying to make its own path with the Momentus XT Hybrid SSD. It’s a clever concept - a traditional 7200 RPM drive with 4 gigs of an ultra-fast SLC SSD built in. It memorizes what programs you use the most, and loads it into the read-only part of the drive.
One notable reviewer lauded it, proclaiming “finally a good hybrid SSD!” The problem is, this high-profile reviewer measured it on a Windows system. The AppleNinja got her hands on it, and found it strongly DECREASED her system speed in OSX. Read more to get the gritty details of why Mac users should not buy this drive.
I measured the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid in the very latest, greatest, top-of-the-line Macbook Pro - a 15 inch with an i7 processor. This is the best MBP you can get without a build-to-order option. It has a high def screen, a great processor, and tragically a 5400 RPM drive.
It seemed crazy to me when I bought it. Why would Apple cripple such a great computer with a 5400 RPM drive? I knew I needed to upgrade it since the drive is often the bottleneck in your performance. I settled on the Seagate because I needed both speed and space for the large Photoshop files I would be working on with the powerful new i7 architecture.
The Seagate Momentus XT has to learn which files you use the most so it can load them into the 4 gigs of SLC. For this reason, you can expect no performance gain for the first few times you use it. After cloning my machine from my Time Capsule, a 6 hour process, my machine felt exactly as quick as before. I rebooted it several times to train it which files OSX wanted to use. Sure enough, it got quicker and quicker. Then, the giant drawback hit me.
The non-SSD component of the drive is a traditional 7200 RPM hard drive. These draw more power than a 5400 RPM drive. While it’s true that SSDs use less power than a traditional hard drives, you could only expect to see a power savings while solely using files in the 4 gigs of SLC, not a very realistic scenario.
Battery life plummeted with this new drive. I mean, seriously plummeted. I could get a good four hours of work done with the old drive in my Macbook Pro. Now, battery estimates were showing less than 3. Working throughout the day, I found those estimates were optimistic, and that performance was actually worse than that, a little over 2 hours and 40 minutes. Is losing so much of your battery worth it for the performance gains? I set about to measure it.
Xbench is a Macintosh benchmarking utility that’s really good at measuring all of your components in conjunction to get a snapshot of system performance. It has been my experience that hard drives are almost always the limiting factor. When it tests your system, the longest component of that test is a series of sequential, then random measurements of speed. It was the perfect tool to gauge how fast my new drive was.
Shocked at the result, I repeated the test multiple times. There is no way around this fact - system performance is worse, not better, with the Seagate Momentus XT. Despite the drastic loss in battery power, despite the faster boot up times, despite the $129 cost of this drive - you can expect worse system performance.
Here are the original specs with the stock Apple 5400 hard disk.
And here are the specs with the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid. Note the horrible uncached write result.
I tried testing the machine with other criteria. The other major OSX benchmarking test is Geekbench. It’s great at measuring the differences in the new multicore chips, but not so great in taking hard disk performance into account. In fact, where Xbench spends quite some time putting your hard drive though testing, Geekbench is over almost instantly.
Geekbench showed a mild improvement with the Seagate, increasing my 6150 Geekbench score by almost 175 points. My hypothesis is that having the OSX system files on the SSD portion of the drive is mildly beneficial.
Conclusion
My testing in OSX is pretty straightforward. You should stay far away from this drive. It eats your battery, and all evidence says that your system performance is much worse with this drive. It does boot up faster, it does make your interface slightly faster - but tradeoffs are too substantial to ignore.
It’s clear to me now why Apple put a 5400 RPM drive in the i7 Macbook now. The i7 chip is simply too much of a battery drain. My 2010 13 inch Macbook Pro can pretty easily get seven hours of battery life, but my 15 inch can barely get four. When you aggrevate this situation with a high-def screen and a 7200 RPM drive, your battery is simply devastated. Apple design is all about tradeoffs and balances, and the faster drive is simply too high a tradeoff.