Seagate's newly upgraded Momentus XT drive now sports 750GB of storage and 70 percent faster performance. Seagate says the drive boasts boot-up and application launch speeds comparable to full SSDs despite only having 8GB of solid-state storage—all for only $245.
Released last year, the first-generation Momentus drive promised PC users what sounded like a miracle: they could have the blazing-fast performance of SSDs at a fraction of the cost and without the endemic reliability problems. Solid state drives are fast, yes, but they fail and lose capacity faster than conventional hard drives. SSDs are also far more expensive than HDDs.
Seagate's solution to this problem involved making a solid state "hybrid" drive. Translation: a bulk of the drive's capacity relies on a good, old-fashioned hard drive. The key, however, is Seagate's Adaptive Memory technology that learns your behavior and stores the most used files in the solid state portion of the drive to take advantage of the faster performance and stores everything else on the lower-priority spinning-plate hard drive. The technology is so good that it minimizes the number of times that you write to the solid state storage, increasing its lifespan. Seagate even guarantees the drive for five years.
The newest Momentus iteration sports larger 750GB capcity—compared the prior 500GB max—and twice as much flash storage. The new Momentus XT also carries some new technologies to help the drive learn your behavior faster and a special storage location for your machine's boot files—Seagate promises boot times three times faster than an HDD. The second-generation Momentus XT is shipping now, and is available from major retailers. [Seagate]