Who wants a Momentus XT Benchmarks?

Hey there everyone, so I decided to upgrade my harddrive space from 320-500 and i thought might as well throw in an extra 30 bucks to try out one of these new hybrid drives.

Momentus XT | 7200 RPM | Seagate

Does anyone want any benchmark comparisons between

ST95005620AS(the new drive) and WD3200BEKT-75A25T0(the old drive)

if so, what type of benchmarks?

I plan on installing the new drive in the next 48 hrs or so.

 

I did that same upgrade basically. Went from a Seagate 7200RPM/16MB/320GB drive to the Seagate's Momentus XT 7200RPM/32MB/4GB/500GB drive.

I never did benchmarks on it (though Anandtech did last May), but the difference was very, very obvious to me. The only times hard drive speed really effects me are boot time mostly, and program loads to a lesser extent. My XT feels like it's cut boot time and how soon it is where you can actually use the system in less than half. The perception is it's really, really faster and more pleasant.

Great drive, although I wish they had a 750GB version now that they have a normal 7200RPM/16MB/750GB drive out!

If you're buying a new one it might already have it applied, but there's a firmware update for it that takes it from like version 23 to 24 or something. Only noticeable thing is mine no longer randomly spins down when not in use (when I have Windows set to never spin it down, but the drive itself still used to sometimes if it wasn't being used...fixed in 24, though it never gave me issues or anything previously...the update process required a reboot but was fast and painless).

 

Hi, I just recently got the Momentus XT drive, however for some reason I cannout update the firmware. I am still at version 23. Everytime I update it via the windows application, it reboots and then loads the the updater but then get stuck at the AHCI.....

I tired using the CD, but it loads up but then just says somthing about not finding Drive 01 or something and then it reaches the instructions part in DOS mode and thats it.

Any advice or how you went abouts it would be greatly helpful. Thanks.

 

Simple reply. Yes please

 

Do you have the drive in the right mode on the BIOS? Maybe it can't do it if it's emulating IDE or whatever it would be called in there?

 

I not trying to jack your thread but i'm having issues adding the same hard drive to my M15X. If you guys could take a look at my thread and help out figuring it out it would be appreciated.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/564598-need-help-hybrid-drive.html

 

Okay I got it solved. Apparently the cd image worked. So just FYI after it loads up to the warns and instructions part, you see the blinking prompt and all you need to do it press the "esc" key and it will load up the firmware page. After that is done press "d" and it will update your firmware. Anyways took me 4 hours to last night to try to figure out which in fact was only a 5 minutes process. Had to look online to search for this too. Thanks though.

 

Installed momentus xt 6 months ago and there is only a marginal increase in speed, nothing to get excited about.

 

The momentus xt does not provide a speed increase. What it does it allocates your most used files to the ssd cache. So in benchmarks and speed tests, there will be a minimal difference. However in booting and using your most used programs, you will notice that startup is snappier.

 

Provided a noticeable speed boost for me.

I'd say the same thing as before...make sure your system is set in the right mode and not emulating an old IDE drive. If that doesn't work, try to "repair" Windows. If that doesn't work, do a clean install. I've NEVER had good luck trying to move stuff without doing a reinstall.

 

@Wolfpup, what I mean by minimal difference is for the people with a Seagate 7200.4 HDD to begin with because the XT is the same HDD just with 4GB of nand slapped to it. My friend didn't see much increase in disk speed but load times were faster. I glad you got a speed increase though.

 

I came from a 7200RPM Seagate. It also has a 32MB instead of normal 16MB cache.

And you're being dismissive of faster load times-that's precisely the point, and precisely what most people most need sped up.

 

right, same here. however trying out benchmarks... you will find there is usually no increase. this is because the benchmarks deliberately try random read/writes to the drive so the xt is not able to write this data to the cache (it's re-written each time you perform the bench --- even the sequential read/write on that matter)

however since your boot files remain constant... a nice boost in the startup time is noticed almost immediately. I noticed an amazing speed boost by the third reboot (just reboot 3 times in a row after installing your setup)

in order for it to maintain this speed however, one must usually disable stuff that's normally reading random files for no reason (stuff like real time defraggers and virus scanners) heck i set my virus scanner to read files only on execute and disable that "scan in background" stuff because all that is going to end up in the ssd cache when i don't want it to.

set up correctly, this drive is quite amazing. huzzah for boot time < 20 sec with storage > 500gb.
on that note tho, i just bought the hdd caddy and am going to install an ssd + 1tb drive setup since my dvd is just collecting dust.. so much in fact it has trouble reading disks.

 

Yeah, but that type of scenario isn't really where you most want a performance boost. The XT helps where it matters most-boot time and launching frequently used programs.

I've done nothing at all special. Never rebooted extra, didn't disable anything. There's still a noticeable speed boost. Maybe it would be better if I optimized it in some way, don't know. Not sure though since I'd assume frequently used files from most/all of my frequently used programs and OS are fitting on the XT's SLC cache just fine.

I'd be curious to see if I could improve stuff even more, though not enough to actually bother trying :laugh: