500 GB Seagate Momentus XT - $95

Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

$94.99 and free shipping after promo EMCKFHJ32 (expires 11:59pm PT on 04/24/2011)

A fantastic hybrid drive.  Ideal if you want the read speed of an SSD but the cheap storage of a platter drive.

Wow, almost half of the reviews are 3 stars or less. I guess Seagate reliability strikes again.

5 Eggs -  54% (239)

4 Eggs -  17% (73)

3 Eggs -  9% (40)

2 Eggs -  8% (33)

1 Eggs -  13% (55)

You might want to recheck your math on that one...

I've got one of these drives and have had no issues with it.  Highly recommended.

Whoops. Ok, almost half of the 4/5 star reviews are 3 eggs or less, not half of all reviews. Over half of the reviews are 5 star though.

I really don't understand your statement.  Newegg doesn't have 4/5 star reviews, everything is on the scale of 1 - 5 Eggs.

4/5 as in 4 and 5 star.

I understand that.  What I don't understand is:

almost half of the 4/5 star reviews are 3 eggs or less

How can 4 and 5 Egg reviews be 3 Eggs or less?  Those categories are mutually exclusive...

It makes sense in my head. If you add up the number of 4 and 5 stars, divide that by half, it is slightly above the total number of 1, 2, and 3 star reviews. Does that help?

I guess that makes sense, but I still don't understand why that is a useful rubric.  Are you trying to determine a rough ratio between good and bad reviews?

I have 3 of these drives and I'll probably purchase a 4th. I like them allot. Fast drives for laptops.

Are you trying to determine a rough ratio between good and bad reviews?

Yes. I know you and others have had good experiences, but I've had a few Seagate failures, and I just can't buy it knowing that so many people have also had bad experiences despite the overwhelming good experiences.

It makes sense in my head. If you add up the number of 4 and 5 stars, divide that by half, it is slightly above the total number of 1, 2, and 3 star reviews. Does that help?

I think that what you are saying is that 2/3 of all reviews are 4 or 5 eggs.  1/3 of all reviews are 3 eggs or less.

I've always hated fractions!

Now, back to the drives!

From what I understand about those drives, the biggest complaint was the artificial pause being introduced by the firmware because the platter portion of the drives was sleeping much too quickly.

The newest firmware has fixed that issue, and now I see nothing but positive remarks about this drive. I definitely see this as the future for laptops. In a desktop, you can easily have a SSD drive for boot/apps and a platter drive for data, while a laptop is usually limited to one drive (I know, I know, you can remove the optical drive and install a hd caddy bought from ebay, but really, how many non-geek folks will be doing that).

As far as reliability, I don't get the feeling (again, no personal experience. Purely based on reviews and reading) it's any worse than any other drive (though I haven't see any hard numbers re: failure rate)...

If I used my laptop for more then surfing the web/remote access/accessing unRaid, I would buy one asap. As was previously stated, it's an excellent compromise between performance, and usability!

my 2¢!

[EDIT] Seagate gives them a 5-year warranty and a .5% failure rate... Not too shabby

I have 3 of these drives and I'll probably purchase a 4th. I like them allot. Fast drives for laptops.

I'm a long time Seagate fan.  Do you see an improvement in writing to the disk over non-hybrid?

The SSD portion doesn't affect writes whatsoever, just reads.  However, the platter is 7200 rpm unlike most laptop drives which are 5400 rpm, so the writes are still quite fast, just not SSD-fast.

Writes perform as Raj said.

In my personal experience, upgrading from a 5400 Drive in one machine everything improved.

On my music production machine which was a 100GB 7200 RPM Seagate, the improvement was drastic in all operations.

I haven't really read up on those hybrid drives.

How would I go about putting my OS on the ssd part of the drive.  Is it done automatically after a couple of boots?

How would I go about putting my OS on the ssd part of the drive.  Is it done automatically after a couple of boots?

It's done automatically in that files that are most often used, get kept in the SSD part. Not necessarily just OS stuff, but most commonly used apps etc as well... I believe it learns over time...

It's done automatically in that files that are most often used, get kept in the SSD part. Not necessarily just OS stuff, but most commonly used apps etc as well... I believe it learns over time...

Ahh alright, that's what I thought.  Thanks!

(sucks that on newegg.ca the drive is 110$, might wait for it to drop a bit more over here before I get it)

It's not that it learns files, I've read that it learns most often used LBA's.

So this boils down to reading any form of filesystem tables, directories and/or files.

I'm so happy with mine that I own three and plan to buy a fourth.

I really can't wait for large 2TB hybrid drives.

I'd get one for my MBP if they weren't such a PITA to install drives in. I did it once; with a Seagate 320 GB 7200 and I'll never do it again (unless I buy a new one of course)

Ok so I just ordered two of those drives, managed to find them for 97$CAN which is the cheapest I've seen em.

My question is, I know it's not a good idea to defrag a ssd drive, but what about hybrid drives like the momentus xt.  Should I do regular defrag even if 4gb out of the 500 are ssd memory?

Thanks for your time.

I think you'll be ok. From what I read, the firmware tracks how often an LBA is accessed and only the most often accessed LBA's are put into the SSD portion.

From the product specs.

"7200-RPM hard drive with 32MB of cache, 4GB of solid state SLC NAND flash storage"

Any reason to not preclear such a disk as a burn in test?

Writes do not affect the SLC SSD portion of the drive. I see no reason on why a preclear would cause issues.