The SSD Review – January 2012
“Speaking strictly of Momentus XT’s results though, I am honestly blown away. The concept of a hybrid drive was very intriguing to me, and to see it come into fruition as it has makes me confident for the future of hybrid drives. Anything that can lower the GB/$ value and acquiesce SSD-like speeds is a win-win in my book. If you’re on the fence on whether or not to get a hybrid drive, strike while the iron is hot and go for it. You will not be disappointed.” Read the entire review.
PC Magazine – January 2012
” The Seagate Momentus XT definitely provides that, with an attractive blend of capacity and performance that’s difficult to find elsewhere, especially if a laptop is the drive’s chosen destination…There may be more and better options out there now than there were 19 months ago, but for a one-stop storage speed-up solution, the new Momentus XT is, as was its predecessor, a compelling choice.” Read the entire review.
Icononic – December 2011
“I’m fascinated with this drive. It represents the pinnacle of hard drive technology, and is the best in class for what it does. It’s basically the perfect hard drive for a very large niche, and I know for sure that I’ll be recommending it to anybody building a system or upgrading a laptop. Because of this, I’m very happy to award the Seagate Momentus XT 750gb hybrid drive our rare Icrontic Golden Fedora, our highest honor for product excellence.” Read the entire review.
CNET – November 2011
“The bottom line: Similar to the original, the Momentus XT (second generation) makes an excellent host drive for any computer, both laptops and desktops. It offers great value in terms of performance and cost, especially when compared to SDDs. The Seagate Momentus XT (second generation) is a worthy upgrade to the original Momentus XT that was released more than a year ago. The new drive now comes with twice the amount of flash memory (also known as solid-state storage) and offers 50 percent more storage space.” Read the entire review.
Bjorn3D – November 2011
“We feel that every notebook should come with a Momentus XT as oppose to any mechanical drives. While the drive is designed primarily for notebooks, we think it can also be a very viable option for desktop systems for those who like the SSD-like performance without worrying about data management of an small SSD and 3.5’’ drive combo setup…The second generation Momentus XT from Seagate delivers good performance gain, a 50% increase in capacity, and double the NAND flash and interface speed than the last generation drive. The result is impressive, and it earns the Bjorn3D Golden Bear Award.” Read the entire review.
Laptop Magazine – November 2011
“If you want the fastest performance possible, then a full-fledged SSD such as the Samsung 830 Series ($209 for 128GB) is still the way to go. However, if you need more a drive with a lot more than 128GB of storage and can’t afford to mortgage the farm for a 256GB or larger SSD, the Seagate Momentus XT is your best upgrade option. Seagate also says that some OEMs will also be offering the drive as an option on their notebooks, which makes the Momentus XT a great configuration option when you buy from vendors such as Dell and Lenovo, which custom build your system. The second-generation Momentus XT provides application / file opens and boots that are significantly faster than those of a 7,200 rpm hard drive and only a little bit slower than an SSD. Considering that app opens and boots are the most important drive operations, the Momentus XT is well worth its asking price.” Read the entire review.
Hot Hardware – November 2011
“That said, for users that can’t afford a larger capacity SSD and are limited to only a single drive configuration, like notebook or some HTPC users, for example, the Momentus XT can be a great fit. You’ll get a good amount of storage space and SSD-like performance in a single drive, with any OS and no special software or drivers to deal with.” Read the entire review.
Hardware Canucks – November 2011
“While it may have some limitations in terms of what it can and can’t do, the Momentus XT 750GB is one hell of an innovative drive. It learns usage patterns quicker than any Hybrid setup we have seen before and Seagate’s engineers have once again proven why they are a force to be reckoned with. For systems that can only handle a single 2.5” storage device we know this would be the one we reach for. It can offer near- SSD real world performance while maintaining a relatively high capacity and does so while offering a completely seamless user experience. Hopefully, the hints our Seagate reps dropped about a certain 3.5” “XT” Hybrid version are indeed true as Seagate now have the building blocks to create a true SSD “killer”.” Read the entire review.
Storage Review – November 2011
“The Seagate Momentus XT 750GB with FAST Factor doubles the cache NAND and adds a 50% capacity boost when compared to the 500GB first generation Momentus XT. While it’s easy to look at something like FAST and shrug it off as marketing hype, the new Momentus XT showed that the added cache and software do make a difference, boasting a 34% increase in performance in our HTPC real world test and a 26% gain in our gaming trace. It gets even better for the generation two XT when you look at some of the synthetic tests like the IOMeter server profiles.” Read the entire review.
Legit Reviews – November 2011
“Overall, we’d certainly recommend the Momentus XT and frankly wouldn’t go back to a plain old hard drive unless we were forced to. The expediency of boot and application load times are something that, once you get used to it, you can’t seem to live without. Keep in mind that it may take two or three times for the Adaptive Memory Technology to decide that it should be cached and speed things up. On the down side, every operation is not SSD fast, especially if you’re performing it for the first time. Levels in games may or may not load quicker depending on how much data is redundant from level to level and if it’s been awhile since you’ve opened an application, you may find yourself waiting just a bit longer. The 8GB of NAND on board is comparatively tiny against the 750GB platter so there’s a finite amount of data that can be cached as the algorithm sees fit. As NAND prices fall, we’ll probably see these type of drives incorporate larger amounts of solid state material that will allow for a looser threshold of what gets cached and what doesn’t and maximize the reads coming from the solid state portion of the drive.” Read the entire review.
Overclockers Club – November 2011
“The 750GB Momentus XT Hybrid drive sees a 100% increase in the amount of SLC NAND used when compared to the 500GB gen 2 drive released last year. The capacity has increase by 50%, the interface has changed to a SATA 6Gb/s and comes with new “FAST” factors. All this is great but what happens when the NAND flash fails? Worst case scenario is that the drive acts just like a 7200 RPM mechanical drive. There is no data loss if the NAND fails as the data is written in parallel to both the platters and to the NAND giving some much needed redundancy without a huge performance overhead cost. All the fancy buzz words and technology boil down to an improvement in user experience without the cost, reliability and capacity concerns of an SSD. I cannot see where this drive from Seagate has any real down sides as you get the snappy performance of an SSD with the capacity of a traditional mechanical drive.” Read the entire review.
ubergizmo – November 2011
“It’s been interesting to see Seagate refine its hybrid SSD drives and improve upon the software aspect of things. The Seagate momentus XT is the perfect answer to the speed vs capacity problem that a huge computing population has, namely “they want it all”: capacity, small form factor (2.5” for laptop) and speed. This disk is one of the best solution for that particular challenge, and laptop buyers who want large capacity drives should actually be demanding a Seagate momentus XT from their OEMs.” Read
Notebook Review – November 2011the entire review.
“Should you spend $245 on the new 750GB Seagate Momentus XT when you can buy a traditional laptop hard drive with 1TB of storage capacity for slightly less? The short answer: Yes. While 1TB notebook hard drives like the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10JPVT and the Samsung Spinpoint M8 offer a massive amount of storage and reasonable speed, there is just no way that a traditional hard drive can match the speed of the new Momentus XT after the drive has “learned” which files you use on a regular basis. Windows boot times are fast, application switching is snappy, and the cost per GB is far more reasonable than a high-performance SSD. The Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD is amazingly fast, but that drive costs $470 at the time of this writing. The Momentus XT is basically half the price for three times more storage space.” Read the entire review.
Maximum PC – November 2011
“The 750GB Momentus XT offers a solid speed boost in real-world applications that you use frequently, compared to a regular mechanical drive. Its updated capacity, 6Gb/s SATA controller, and 8GB of NAND are much appreciated. If you don’t want to deal with clumsy multi-drive hybrid solutions or shell out for a tiny SSD, the Momentus XT offers an easier, better way to get both capacity and speed.” Read the entire review
Benchmark Reviews – November 2011
“I really like where the Seagate Momentus XT series is heading, because I firmly believe all-in-one hybrid storage solutions are the future… at least until NAND flash components can cost as much as mechanical counterparts. Multi-part hybrid solutions with 3rd party software, such as those currently promoted by the competition, are hardly a match for integrated hybrid products like Momentus XT. Now grown to offer 750 Gigabytes of storage capacity, the new second-generation Seagate Momentus XT is offering the best of both worlds better than anyone else.” Read the entire review.
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