| Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid ST750LX003 |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Monday, 28 November 2011 | |
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Page 9 of 10
Compressed File TransfersSynthetic benchmark tools are very useful, but sometimes it helps to reproduce real-world tasks; our file transfer test does exactly that. The goal of this test was to measure write time to the test drive, using three 1GB compressed files. Since we wanted to ensure our source drive was faster than all the destination drives tested, we utilized a RAM-Disk partition based on the a 4GB portion of the 16GB Kingston DDR3 installed in the system. Each file weighed exactly 1GB (1073741824 bytes) after maximum GZip ultra compression, and three of these files were transferred from the source to destination all at once. This process was completed ten times on each hybrid drive to ensure caching algorithms were given every opportunity; however this was an unnecessary step as write-to file transfer functions are not cached. The results were consistent with every test, with the transfer time illustrated in the chart below:
Based on our results, file transfer speeds will depend on the media written to. In the case of hybrid drives that media is the hard disk, which benefits more from the integrated DRAM buffer than any logic-controlled SSD cache. The SSD performed file transfers fastest, followed by the RAID-0 combination of Momentus XT SSHDs. Beyond these two stand-out storage solutions, results were very similar. In the next section I share my conclusion and share the final product rating.
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Comments
Your observation that at least a 32GB size Cache or larger 64GB would improve it is spot on. I'd love to own a few of them with a large Cache.
I'll stick with my SSD for a system drive which is always fast, not just under some conditions. Adding more RAM would increase the price of a drive like this to the point where one might as well purchase an SSD. The only real advantage I see to a hybrid drive is that, as it gets closer to being filled up, you should still get the same transfer rates unlike some SSDs. Also, you don't have to purposefully leave some empty space for trash collection and wear leveling. I try and keep my SSD under 60% capacity to try and increase its longevity, something you shouldn't have to worry about with a hybrid. So I could completely understand anyone installing one of these in a laptop computer. It would give you the fast system you would get with an SSD (most likely) while having a larger less expensive overall capacity as compared to an SSD.
Definitely an interesting idea. However, now you're convinced me to go out and purchase a second SSD for my desktop system drive and set it up in a RAID 0.
benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=513
You can go onto other forums around the 'net and talk to people using SSD RAIDs. So far so good for me.
If they doubled the cache again, would it would perform better? (I suspect it's really a matter of software and architecture)
Using an artificial benchmark on the RAID 0 I just set up with two 60GB SATA II SSDs (Corsair and Patriot). I was getting 246 MB/s on a fresh install of the Patriot Inferno SSD, and now with a fresh install on the RAID 0 I'm getting 461MB/s using HD tune. My boot time has gone from just over 20 seconds to just over 10 seconds after post. I'll learn more as I use it more but so far I am experiencing a significant performance increase."
Back on topic - RAID-0 for two of these 750 GB hybrid drives? On my top-of-the-line Hp Pailion notebook, it has 2 conventional drives, but no hardware RAID controller. As well as W&-64bit, I run several Ubuntu booting choices. So in Linux or Apple IOS, i could run software RAID-0. Curious if it has ever been attempted before ...
The price differential is close enough now that I question myself as to whether I should commit to a lower price and higher storage capacity, or commit to higher price with better reliability and overall performance. Personally, I am also thinking about cheap 2.5? 1TB 5400rpm drives as a backup solution for the 500GB(x2) SSD solution or going to the Seagate Momentus XT 750GB drives (x2) with higher capacity space and higher SSD cache of 8GB per drive, than the 500GB first generation drives had with 4GB SSD per drive, also then switching my drive solution to RAID-1 (Mirroring) instead of RAID-0 (stripping) where I can forget about the need for backup drives.
One other think I am thinking about is the new mSATA mini SATA SSD drives that now match full size SSD drives of 6Gbps. Check out these two links.
##mydigitaldiscount.com/solid-state-drives-msata-ssd/?&sort=alphaaz&sort_direction=0&xsearch_e12=256GB
##mydigitaldiscount.com/msata-ssd-compatability-list.html
If every penny count and you are on a tight budget, then this Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid ST750LX003 drive is a great solution for the price. I do think the full and mini SATA SSD drives will force conventional and hybrid drives down even further to where they will amost become obsolete. However, I have found research that SSD drives on average have about 2 million read write operations before they fail. To my knowledge, data cannot be recovered from an SSD. On the other hand, with a little bit of money, you can have data recovered from conventional hard drives. In this way, some might say that a hybrid hard drive offers a combination of performace enhancement and residual data recovery opportunity, should you fail to backup your data regularly. So this drive is good food for thought.
At least that's the theory. Although consumer SSDs have been on the market for several years now, I haven't heard of this happening yet.
Data recovery from a failed drive should never be a consideration-- that's what backups are for. Companies like DriveSavers do offer SSD data recovery, though, should you need it.