Seagate today has released the company’s first Hybrid Hard Drive, the Seagate Momentus XT, that combines a physical spinning disk with a bit of solid state NAND to give the best in performance. Seagate claims that this drive is around 80% faster than a normal 7,200 RPM hard drive, and looking at the tests done by AnandTech in their review (check the source link below) it appears as though this is close to being the truth. Performance-wise the drive sits somewhere between a WD VelociRaptor and a 5,400 RPM drive.
The drive itself is available in 250 GB, 320 GB and 500 GB capacities for US$133, US$132 and US$156 respectively, which comes out to around US$60-70 more than a standard 7,200 RPM drive. Each drive also comes with 4 GB of solid state NAND to help speed up the drives and store critical data that needs to be accessed quickly; what is put in the NAND is up to the on-board controller. The drive is perfect for laptops as it comes only in a 2.5″ form factor with a 9mm height, plus 32 MB of cache for the 7,200 RPM disk.
The drives should be available very soon from your favourite retailers.












