this is going to be a relatively quick unboxing this is the Seagate momentus XT
and it is an unbagging rather more than an unboxing this is a 320 GB version of
the drive but it's available in a few different capacities and this is a
revolutionary device the reason is because and you can see that when I open
it up it will come out of the bag and it
will be 2 and2 inches and it will have a SATA interface or SATA 2 rather power
and data and then jump but so far I haven't shown you anything
revolutionary about it what's revolutionary about this is actually
what's under the hood this is a magnetic drive that's why you get a nice high
capacity at a very reasonable price but it also has a small 4 gig SSD built in
now that doesn't mean that you actually get uh any significant capacity boost
you're not adding the SSD for that you're adding the SSD built in in order
to get a speed boost so while you won't
quite get the speed of an SSD you won't
be stuck with the speed of a hard drive now I'm also going to explain a little
bit how all this works we've had cash on hard drives for a very very long time
cash acts as a way for the hard drive to take frequently accessed data and throw
it onto a much faster storage medium so that for for like a quick random read or
a quick random write you can use the cash for much faster performance than if
you actually had to wait for the disc to rotate for the ARM to seek and for it to
find that bit of data now what an SSD
allows us to do is have a much larger
cach typically even on a high-end desktop Drive these days you're going to
see only about a 32 Meg to a 64 Meg cache so when we start introducing a 4
Gigabyte SSD cache that well it's not as
fast as normal cache but it is much bigger and it does give much much better
performance for small random reads and writes versus me magnetic okay so
basically what cate's aiming to do with this is take some of the very frequently
used data things like your OS so you can reduce things like boot time as well as
very frequently Asked uh accessed programs and you can speed up the
performance of this drive and then you can also just have regular performance
when you load on your main programs and
any sort of large data storage files so what they're doing on a micro scale is
what a lot of people have been doing for a while is they're taking a small SSD
and using it as their boot drive for their boot Drive in their critical applications and then they're installing
a separate magnetic hard drive in their system for mass storage well now it's
all in one unit very cool