The Drive

The Seagate Momentus XT 500GB came without retail packaging and simply in the usual anti-static packaging you would expect for a hard drive.

Anyone expecting to see anything different from a regular drive will be disappointed as to the naked eye the drive looks like any other mechanical 2.5” drive.

Seagate's typical blue PCB can be seen under the drive. And of course there is the usual SATA headers. It's quite a thin drive at only 9mm so should fit nicely anywhere.

Testing

Test Setup: Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 @ 3.20GHz, 4GB of OCZ PC2-6400 Ram @ 960MHz, Asus Blitz Formula, Asetek Waterchill Watercooling, Hyper Type M 730w PSU. All latest drivers as of May 2010 and the OS is Windows 7 64bit.

Testing this drive is going to have to be done a little differently than usual. The problem here is that because the Seagate Momentus XT has to learn from usage patterns, and because it has a large mechanical portion, low level raw read and write tests won't show much difference than you would expect of a 500GB 32MB cache mechanical drive. Nor will file transfers. So what we need here is a combination of tests that show more real world performance. Because the drive needs to learn, each of the tests will be run 3 times, and then 3 times again with an average taken from the last 3 runs. I'm also going to talk a little about the subjective use of the drive.

– We used Lavalys Everest's Disk Benchmark Read Test Suite to test the read capabilities of the drive. This is a synthetic test and does little to show the capabilities of the Momentus XT drive but included as part of our regular test suite.

– Also a Synthetic test, but the results show what the Momentus XT and it's Adaptive memory can do a little better.

Small Files Transfer - A group of small files (MP3's, Written Documents, Video Files and Picture files) were copied to and from the device and the time taken recorded. The average over 3 tests were used for the final results.

Large File Transfer – Those same small files were then compressed to a Zip file and the single file transferred to the device. The average over 3 tests were used for the final results.

Boot Time – With a Windows 7 64bit setup, we timed the boot (after POST) to desktop including various background applications such as Windows Sidebar gadgets, Firewall software, Hardware controller/monitoring software and communication applications including mIRC, MSN, and Mailwasher. When the last program/gadget finished loading, the time was recorded, and an average taken over 3 tests, and after 3 runs.

Game Loading Time – We used Crysis Warhead, and timed how long it took to start the Ambush demo in DX10 Enthusiast levels using the Framebuffer benchmark.