Seagate Momentus XT SSD Hybrid Hard Drive 320GB Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
532 words · ~2 min read
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this is going to be a relatively quick unboxing this is the Seagate momentus XT
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and it is an unbagging rather more than an unboxing this is a 320 GB version of
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the drive but it's available in a few different capacities and this is a
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revolutionary device the reason is because and you can see that when I open
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it up it will come out of the bag and it
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will be 2 and2 inches and it will have a SATA interface or SATA 2 rather power
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and data and then jump but so far I haven't shown you anything
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revolutionary about it what's revolutionary about this is actually
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what's under the hood this is a magnetic drive that's why you get a nice high
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capacity at a very reasonable price but it also has a small 4 gig SSD built in
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now that doesn't mean that you actually get uh any significant capacity boost
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you're not adding the SSD for that you're adding the SSD built in in order
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to get a speed boost so while you won't
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quite get the speed of an SSD you won't
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be stuck with the speed of a hard drive now I'm also going to explain a little
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bit how all this works we've had cash on hard drives for a very very long time
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cash acts as a way for the hard drive to take frequently accessed data and throw
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it onto a much faster storage medium so that for for like a quick random read or
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a quick random write you can use the cash for much faster performance than if
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you actually had to wait for the disc to rotate for the ARM to seek and for it to
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find that bit of data now what an SSD
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allows us to do is have a much larger
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cach typically even on a high-end desktop Drive these days you're going to
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see only about a 32 Meg to a 64 Meg cache so when we start introducing a 4
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Gigabyte SSD cache that well it's not as
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fast as normal cache but it is much bigger and it does give much much better
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performance for small random reads and writes versus me magnetic okay so
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basically what cate's aiming to do with this is take some of the very frequently
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used data things like your OS so you can reduce things like boot time as well as
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very frequently Asked uh accessed programs and you can speed up the
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performance of this drive and then you can also just have regular performance
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when you load on your main programs and
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any sort of large data storage files so what they're doing on a micro scale is
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what a lot of people have been doing for a while is they're taking a small SSD
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and using it as their boot drive for their boot Drive in their critical applications and then they're installing
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a separate magnetic hard drive in their system for mass storage well now it's
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all in one unit very cool