Subjective Use

I think it's important to comment on the subjective use of the as many of our usual tests don't really reflect the drives high performance in every day usage. The mechanical portion of the drive alone is quite fast as 7200 RPM drives go, but you can easily tell when something has been loaded from the Flash mirror. I've only been able to use the drive since Friday morning but my impression from the short time I've used it is that it works quite well in anticipating your needs.

I don't reboot often, but unless I alter something between boots, add a new desktop gadget or include another program in the Startup folder, the boot times don't vary by much and seem to remain at their fastest. Any changes are picked up and acted upon for the next boot. I do most of my web surfing first thing in the morning and again early evening. Later in the evening I'll likely play a game. The first day's overall experience, I could see the Adaptive Memory at work. On the second day it wasn't so apparent as once again I did my morning surf, evening surf and then played a few games which the drive was already prepared for; applications loaded quickly. In between this were random typing (of this review amongst others), a little photo editing, some random Googling, email at irregular intervals and of course testing.

Do something new and the system is a little slower; do it again and things become much more rapid. File transfers don't really benefit from the Flash, but I didn't expect them to. However the day to day stuff, the opening of programs and using those programs, it's clear to see the benefit the 4GB flash provides.

Final Words

It's been a very interesting review testing and living with the . It has a 7200RPM, 32MB Cache mechanical drive coupled with a fast 4GB SLC Nand Flash mirror. It's not going to win any overall speed awards against an SSD, so if you were hoping for that you're going to be disappointed. But once it establishes a usage pattern and caches the needed data to the Flash, then the drive does give you a near to SSD experience, albeit a lower end SSD.

The drive literally becomes faster as you use it, which is the only real downside here. Whilst there is no disputing that the mechanical portion of the drive is quick, it can't compete with the 4GB flash, and until the drive learns your usage habits you won't get the full benefit. It does seem to learn pretty quickly however, and in the limited time I've had to use it, I've had no indication that more than 4GB Flash was ever required. The Adaptive Memory is supposed to build up an intelligent pattern based on your usage and pre-load your data; for example it might mirror all of your professional work related files during the day, but for night time use it will already have mirrored the games you play. In my limited testing this appears to be the case. Either that or the 4GB is plenty of room and it's managed to store all the needed data.

The also sports a nice 32MB cache for the 7200RPM Mechanical portion, and this makes the drive pretty quick when it comes to writes. So you get a combination of fast writes, and fast reads.

Of course the real attraction here is the price; the 500GB I've tested here today has a MSRP of $156 but I've seen a pre-order for $134. A standard 500GB 2.5” 7200RPM drive can be had for around $60 and a 500GB SSD is a wallet busting $1300 or more. That is where the has a clear edge. It costs double a standard drive, a quarter of a similar capacity SSD, but you get the benefit of the extra performance when you need it that belies the cost. You don't have to compromise between speed and capacity because you can't afford it, the offers a little of both.

Is it going to compete with an SSD for performance? No. Even my slower M10 beats it in most read tests (but not writes) but that's not the point. My M10 cost about the same as the 500GB , and it only has 30GB capacity. And while it may not beat the M10 for speed, it often comes very close. Subjectively, once the has begun to use the Flash to deliver data, there is a similar experience from both drives. Applications open snappily, desktop gadgets all load at near enough the same time, and the whole system feels faster. I've had very little time with the in a notebook (a couple of hours before publishing this review in fact) but another bonus for notebook use is resuming from sleep. The first time, the time is no different, but if your usage stays the same, the notebook will resume Windows faster than previously.

It'd be great to put an SSD in my notebook, but I can't justify the expense against the loss of capacity because my notebook will only take one SATA drive. The offers me a best of both worlds approach that won't break the bank. Looking past it's obvious benefits for notebooks, the Momentus XT would make for a great SFF drive, perhaps an HTPC where you simply just want to use the system and not wait around for it to boot, but you don't want to spend more on an SSD just to decrease your boot time. Especially relevant there since most HTPC's/SFF PC's have limited space for drives, and you don't want to lose out on storage space. Or how about as a compliment to an SSD in a desktop system? Many use a combination of an SSD as the boot/Application drive and then a mechanical drive for high capacity storage. Since both an SSD and the Momentus XT are 2.5", they could share a caddy/adapter to hold two drives in a 3.5" bay. Or simply just use the as your main drive in your desktop.

It's versatile, it's small in size, large in capacity, and once it's been in use for a short time, it's high in performance too. There is a lot to like with the .

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