For Seagate's sake we hope that the second time is the charm, as its first generation of Momentus XT hard drives with a small SLC SSD cache didn't exactly take the world by storm. Currently the new Momentus XT is only available in a single size of 750GB, plus 8GB of SLC NAND flash of course, although the real change is actually the software part and here Seagate has spent a lot of time optimizing things.Seagate claims that the new Momentus XT is close to 70 percent faster than its predecessor and up to three times faster than a comparable hard drive of the same size. That said, at the moment the caching only applies to read performance and even in this case only under ideal scenarios where the SSD part of the drive has a chance to cache the data. Even so it's no slouch compared to other mechanical drives, although it's no match for an SSD. For a few benchmarks of the Momentus XT, head over to StorageReview.com.
The Momentus XT does have one upside compared to most SSD caching solutions, it's platform agnostic thanks to all the software being stored in the drive firmware. Apparently Seagate will be offering future upgrades for the Momentus XT that will allow for write caching as well, although 8GB of flash is still a fairly small amount even compared to Intel's Smart Response which requires a minimum of 18GB of SSD storage space. Beyond all this, the current price point is all wrong, as Seagate is asking for US$245 (S$320) for the Momentus XT, money that would easily buy you a fast 120GB SSD these days. Ok, so there's a trade off in terms of storage space, but overall you'll get vastly better performance.Source: Seagate

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