Seagate Technology (STX)

[MorningLightMountain]

My review of a Seagate Hybrid drive:

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/momentus-xt-hybrid/

In summary, it sucks in my experience (I eventually returned it). Plenty of other reviews can be found, but it didn't work very well for me.

The one I tried was supposed to be their best Hybrid drive, with 8GB of solid state storage, and a 750GB HDD. While I believe the Hybrid drive is a good idea, 8GB is not enough to really make it worth while, so I would not revisit one of these until the SSD portion is more like 64GB, minimum. But I wanted to try the Seagate XT, to see how it compared to a normal SSD.

8GB of SSD indeed gives a faster boot, but for some reason I also had lots of data corruption, and hang ups when trying to shut down. Disk Checks would then report drive errors which were always repairable, but a PITA. I believe that the so called FAST buffering system (which is supposed to intelligently decide which data to keep buffered in the SSD portion) has some bugs. Note that the SSD portion on this drive only mirrors what is stored on the HDD, and is not exclusively stored on the SSD portion. In effect, it is a large nonvolatile buffer for the HDD portion.

For me, the best setup is a plain SSD (giving over 500MB/s read times!!!), with a HDD for "cold storage". One of my machines has a Sandisk Extreme 480GB SSD, which goes for about $350. Not cheap per GB, but once you go SSD, you will never run a HDD again for your main drive....Cheaper SSDS can be bought, but having a larger one with more blank space will also have more capacity for "wear leveling", extending the drive life....

PS: of course, I am still a believer that HDDS will be around for a long time, due to their much cheaper storage prices....