Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive – Brilliant
I finally had the chance to install Seagate’s new Momentus XT hybrid hard drive, and let me tell you, this thing is cool. What is a hybrid hard drive you ask? Well, it is basically a 7200 RPM hard drive topped off with 4GB of solid state memory. Seagate says the memory is “intelligent,” meaning it knows to store the data you frequently access for enhanced read/write times. So how does this little guy perform in a MacBook Pro? Quite well.
Seagate designed the drive such that the computer thinks it is a normal drive. There are no special drivers needed to run it, which is a huge plus in my book. I installed this one in a 2010 i7 MacBook Pro. This laptop was purchased ‘off the shelf’ and therefore contained a 5400 RPM drive – why Apple doesn’t include the 7200 as the factory standard in a $2200 “pro” laptop is puzzling (wish I was still a shareholder). Coming from a 5400 RPM drive I knew the performance gains would be significant, but I never realized it would make this much of a difference.
Boot time has been cut down by about 1/2 and launching apps brings a smile to my face with each click. Some my biggest offenders: Tweetdeck, Lightroom, and Photoshop now open within 2 hops (that’s a Mac technical term, you know). It is really the icing on the cake with this machine. Now if I only had 8GB of RAM…
So should you run out to Amazon or Newegg and put this baby in your shopping cart? If your machine currently as a 5400 RPM drive installed – YES! If you already have a 7200 RPM drive, it will really depend on how thick your wallet is. For me, it was $130 well spent.
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Hummm now they just need a 1TB version…
did you have any trouble installing yours as a fresh install? I put a partition on it and tried to install w/no success. I have read some places where mbp’s have issues w/these drives. I also have read that you can do a full format and it will work from there? What was your method of getting this to work?
@ haber – apologies for the delayed response. I installed the drive, booted off the system restore disk, formatted the drive (one partition), installed the system software off the restore disk (Snow Leopard) and then restored my files from my Time Machine backup. Everything went smoothly for me, I haven’t run into any troubles thus far.
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