august 19 2010 review by xbitlabs

What can flash memory do in an HDD? First of all it can be used to cache write requests, but the 32MB of traditional cache the Momentus XT is equipped with, are going to do that just fine. The biggest effect is going to be produced by caching read requests. But that will only work when the user is accessing the same piece of data over and over again.

Conclusion:

The Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 and Toshiba MKxx56GSY also showed high performance. The effect of flash memory can be easily seen. But will this effect be called for by the operating system? The hybrid drive's resources cannot be fully controlled by the OS. The 4GB cache may be quite enough to make things go faster for some users, especially for notebook users with one HDD bay who just don't have any other means to speed their disk subsystem up. The large hard drives are still faster, but the gap with 2.5 inch drives is getting smaller.

Compared to:

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB, Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 500GB, Toshiba MKxx56GSY 500GB, Seagate Constellation ES 500GB. The hard drives were formatted in NTFS and worked with enabled AHCI.

Benchmarks:

• FC-Test
• IOMark
• IOMeter
• PC Mark Vantage
• Power Consumption
• Windows 7 Disk Defragmenter
• WinRar

Test Setup:

• CPU : Intel Pentium 4 620
• HDD : IBM DTLA-307015 15 GB
• Memory : 1GB DDR2 800MHz
• Motherboard : ASUS P5WDG2 WS Pro
• OS : Windows 7 Ultimate
• Video card : Radeon X600

Key Specifications of the tested drive

• Cache : 32MB
• Capacity : 500GB
• SATA : SATA2
• Speed : 7200-RPM
• SSD : 4GB SLC NAND solid state memory