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You Got Flash In My Hard Drive: Page 2 of 2

I cloned the disk from the machine that until recently was my office desktop. With Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows XP in separate, heavily fragmented, partitions it seemed like a good platform for some benchmarking.  Of course, it wouldn't boot. I tried Clonezilla, Ghost and Acronis True Image all with the same results. I can say the Momentus vastly speeds up the blue screen of death memory dump. I had to reboot five times to see which driver was the culprit.

Once I got everything running, I wanted to see what the Momentus XT was good at.  Enterprise benchmarks like IOmeter work the whole drive evenly and show the Momentus XT to be about as fast as any other 7200RPM drive.  But laptop users don't work the drive evenly. They carry around all the files they may need but in a given day run PowerPoint, Excel or Photoshop. I decided to see how much faster my system with a hybrid drive could boot and load Photoshop (because I hate watching the plug-ins load).  After several boot cycles, my system would come up in roughly 20 seconds compared to 33 for the hard drive.  Photoshop would load in 9 seconds compared to 15 for the hard drive.My gut tells me that this hybrid technology is one of those cases where real world results are better than the benchmarks but only time will tell on that.  I also haven't gotten to putting the pair in a RAID-1 configuration and seeing how the caching works there.

Momentus XTs cost about twice as much as their flashless counterparts and about the same as a 64GB MLC SSD. Personally, I can't live with just 64GB on my laptop and would have to lay out $300 for a 128GB SSD, and even then I'd waste a lot of time on file maintenance as that little disk filled up.  When Seagate asks for them back, I think I'm going to buy one for the laptop myself.