Features, Warranty, and Issues:
The Momentus ® XT was shipped to us just a week before we posted this review and during this week of benchmarking and just general use we have grown to really enjoying the drive and its performance and storage capability. The Momentus® XT comes with a 5 year limited warranty which is above the standard 3 year in todays market. Also if the SSD side of the drive fails, the drive will still function as a standard 7200 RPM drive. The Momentus® XT is designed with high-end laptops and small form factor workstations in mind. We installed ours into our HP mini netbook and really saw a difference in the performance of the netbook once the Windows ® 7 operating system was installed. Initially, we did notice a slight vibration from the Momentus ®XT, but after about 45mins of use it seemed to have dissappeared or we simply just got use to it. The other point was heat from the Momentus ®XT which wasn’t noticably any hotter than the 5400RPM drive we originally had in the Netbook. Lastly the power consumption of the drive appeared to be the same as our 5400 RPM drive, but since the Momentus®XT was designed for more speed than conservation of power, it may not be the drive for those users looking to get hours and hours of continual battery life from their laptop since the 7200RPM spindle of the hybrid drive isn’t designed to spin down while on battery.
Conclusion:
The Momentus ® XT is an ideal replacement drive for your high-end laptop or small form factor PC or even a external portable drive for those large file transfers with quick transfer speeds. The price point for the Seagate® Momentus XT is very attractive at prices comparable to the smallest SSD drive on the market (at the time of this review). The options of different drives sizes of 500GB, 320GB, 250GB, all at a price which is much less than an SSD of equal size and much faster than a equally sized SATA drive. The Seagate ® Momentus ® XT is true out-of-the-box engineering at its purest. Seagate® looked at the market and saw a gap and filled it and in our opinion, with a product that is truly a performer and does it very well. TechwareLabs gladly awards the Seagate® Momentus®XT the Editor’s Choice Award.
You have a very valid point with the exception that we compared it against a 5400rpm drive on purpose. Traditional SATA drives included with most notebooks today are 5400rpm. This drive is intended as an economical upgrade that is no where near as expensive as an SSD and yet offers similar performance. Most users will be more interested in the performance they will gain over their existing drive than to compare this to a standard SSD. In such cases our comparison is both relevant and conveys value to our readers.
What is the point of comparing 5400rpm drive with 7200rpm drive and tell that the 7200rpm puts out positive scores?
Besides, did you even check the AAM/APM settings of the drives and match them before the test?
It appears that these benchmark results are rather useless since it is comparing apples and oranges…