Seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5″ SATA 6.0Gb/s Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

Pros: FAST, 8GB SLC flash memory, combine best of both worlds- flash and HDD!

Cons: Makes you feel spoiled

Overall Review: I remember looking at the 500GB Momentus XT and I thought, “Why would anyone pay such an outrageous price for so little flash memory?”… after newegg had the 750GB on sale now I understand. This thing uses enterprise grade SLC flash memory- not that wimpy MLC. What does this mean? This means that the flash memory will last a very long time and it’s more reliable. SLC is also a lot faster than MLC (not sure though with the recent SF controllers).

Basically, my Mac has a 750GB 5400RPM drive. I have an SSD in my desktop. It isn’t going to cut it, so I bought this. My Macbook boots as if it was a Macbook Air (which I’ve bought and returned due to the lack of capacity) and it has 750GB of space. Seagate… you are amazing!

Pros: Fast, good size for laptop, make phenomenal external USB 3.0 (or ESATA) device. Good price overall. It is way better than the previous generation. SUPER QUIET!

Cons: I have not really found any cons to this drive, other than it think it could benefit from a larger SLC.

Overall Review: I have bought 2 of these drive and plan on buying more. I plan on upgrading my Ps3, and Xbox with these drives, using my Calvery disk duplicator. This drive is just wickedly fast using usb 3.0. It is easily 3x as fast as my usb 2.0 drive. I plan on using it to store movies and files that I don’t want on the laptop. It would make an excellent backup drive as well. Putting 2 of these in raid and then using Intel’s Smart response technology with much larger cache drive should be very effective as well. I just hate raid.

Pros: * Lots of storage space.
* Incredibly fast, noticeably faster than the 500GB Momentus XT it replaced.
* Quiet.
* Easy install, I cloned my 500GB Momentus XT to the new drive using Acronis TrueImage and it automatically aligned the partitions on the 750GB Momentus XT on 4K boundaries.

Cons: * Not as good a value as the 500GB Momentus XT was, which I have bought six of for as little as $89 before the floods in Thailand. All of these drives are going strong in laptops or external enclosures.

Overall Review: I need to correct a statement made by another reviewer with supposedly high tech knowledge:

The drive does NOT prioritize OS files in the cache, it doesn’t care if a file is an OS file or not. As a matter of fact, it has no clue about what a file is, it only cares about LBA blocks. If you read an LBA block frequently enough, it will stay in the cache; if it is read infrequently, it may get bumped out of the cache.

According to Anandtech’s review of the drive, Seagate will be releasing a firmware update soon that will add write caching. That has the potential to drastically improve burst write speeds.

Pros: -This drive does speed up boot greatly, and one or sometimes two often used applications.
-The algorithm for caching files is lower level, so it does not conflict with software level caching set ups.
-This 750G hardware cycle has most of the bugs from previous productions worked out. Which is really nice.
-1 Platter(no multi-level seeking makes it more stable and quicker in my humble opinion.)! Its really small, and really light!

Cons: -The cache is small 🙁 This is honestly my biggest qualm about this product, and I see they will be producing larger caches on the newer drives. But, this drive works rather well now- it just needs more space to play around with caching and I think it will become a fantastic answer to storage vs speed.
-You should really have sata 3gb/s or 6gb/s to see the biggest gains on this.

Overall Review: -The drive is a small one! Laptop size, its designed for a laptop and does not come with mounting brackets- buy some if your installing in a desktop!

Overall, I think this drive is awesome! It provides a good boost in performance and has a very respectable amount of space. It is also really one of a kind on the market right now.

It does work in tandem with a separate SSD cache drive- FYI.

Pros: To begin with, I’ve owned two versions of this drive; the first generation Momentus XT 500gb, and this exact model. I’m a very heavy video editor/gamer. Laptop: Asus G75VW, GTX 660m graphics card, with an Intel 520 SSD for Windows. The Momentus XT serves as my storage drive.

A lot of my computer friends say that my laptop is overkill, but then again, I do work on this computer that would bring most desktops to their knees. I work with raw 4K footage in Premiere Pro, and as such, my Momentus XT takes a THRASHING. Due to my bi-daily defrag of this drive, I’m sure that I’m at least a good 100x past the average read/write rates most DESKTOP drives would ever see, let alone a laptop drive.

To begin with, the Momentus XT is the ONLY platter-based drive that I’ve ever come across which can handle sustained speeds of over 80mb/s, when fragmented. If defragged, I can stay north of 100mb/s sustained. However, the addition of the SSD memory is the reason I bought this drive. After a few boot cycles where I made sure to load Premiere Pro to “train” the SSD on the Momentus to keep Premiere on it, load times are insane. To put this into perspective, one of my friends has a 2012 MacBook Pro running FCPX. With Windows 8, I can go from fully off, to having Premiere loading my 4k footage in the time it takes to get to his login screen.

This drive is extremely fast, and I’m sure that if it is used as a standalone, will serve as a beautiful midpoint between SSD’s and standard HDD’s.

What I think is the most noteworthy feature however, is the drive’s durability. During a shoot, my laptop fell off of the rigtruck while ON, and in the middle of a RAM Preview for color grading a shot my team just took. There was a scary moment when the drive unmounted from Windows, and because I’m used to something like this being the end of a Western Digital, rebooted expecting to find S.M.A.R.T reporting a failed drive.

8 months later, and I’m still running at full speed. My laptop however wears a scar proudly of that ordeal. Can’t ask for better than that.

Cons: I would normally be the kind of guy to spot any little con, but seriously, this drive has NONE. I’m extremely satisfied with these drives, and I look forward to continuing my business with Seagate.

Overall Review: While this may be deemed as overkill, I’m planning a build where I will set up 6 of these in RAID 0 or 1 (to be decided)for my scratch disks/media storage device. I’ll upload a review once I get the scratch together to do this 🙂

Pros: I have three of these. One is in my developer laptop (Dell Elitebook 8540w), one in my personal rig (i950 based system) and one in my sons IBM T61p laptop.

For the Dell I was out of space with the product development builds that I do. Doing full builds dropped from around 1:45min to 1:10 mins (prior drive was Hitachi 7K500-500).

For my personal rig I had a SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB that was about 1/2 full. The machine has 24gig ram and I use VM’s extensively for both testing purposes and misc. sandboxes. I have not bothered timing any scripts but the VM’s do noticeably load faster. One of the common tasks I do in a VM is to rmdir /s directories that have some 100k files in them, and the those complete now about 2x faster than the same operation on another workstation I have with dual spinpoint f3’s 1tb’s in a raid 0.

The most interesting point is the drive in my sons IBM T61p. He uses it for Corel VideoStudio x4 and Adobe suite. He says everything is faster to load.

Cons: For desktops, dont forget to use a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter. Here is low cost one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990015

Overall Review: Would a pure SSD be faster. Sure. But I needed over 500 Gig for each of the drives. And the price is right considering its 750 Gig (considering the crazy prices for HD’s since the flood but those are starting to come down now). I’m building a home media server and I am considering using another one of these for the boot drive.

Pros: I bought two of these hybrids for a RAID0 striped array in my desktop gaming pc. My Steam folder alone is over 500GB and two 512GB SSDs would have been prohibitively expensive at current prices. I created the 1500GB array and Ghosted the data over with the partitions aligned at the 1MB boundary. My initial boot was timed from the BIOS until Steam was running and yielded a 4 minute startup, the same as before installing these hybrids. After Win7 was fully up I used some light apps like Chrome, Steam, and Remote Desktop. Then I rebooted and timed the startup again. This time it was only 60 seconds, a four-fold improvement. The third and fourth boots took only 40 seconds. The fifth boot took only 30 seconds but subsequent reboots did not yield further improvement.

Cons: Obviously these are still much slower overall than a true SSD setup. Also keep in mind that if you are planning to desktop these as I did, be sure to plan ahead with 2.5″ mounting kits if you need to. Most modern PC cases like my Lian Li PC-K62 have drive trays that will accept them natively but yours may not.

Overall Review: It’s yet to be seen how these will perform once I really start gaming heavily on them. That 8GB (16GB in my case) of SSD cache will only go so far. Also for the best burst speeds via the caching, make sure that these are attached to a SATA 6Gb/s controller. Lastly, Newegg seems to have finally learned how to pack hard drives properly. These were double boxed with plenty of bubble wrap, not just thrown randomly into a box with some crumpled paper. Bravo Newegg!

Pros: Installed this in my 2011 Mac Mini. What a difference! No more spinning beachballs. The Mini boots in 18 seconds now instead of 48 seconds. The programs that I use regularly just “POP” onto the screen. The 500gb 3G version made my MAcbook Pro wicked-fast, but this SATA 3 drive is amazing. Before this, the best I could have done was a 240gb 6G SSD for $540 or a 480gb 3G SSD for $1080. This is 6G AND 750gb for only $240. Fast enough for me! Saved me mega-bucks, also.

Cons: None so far other than cost