Seagate has stayed out of the solid state disk (SSD) market for consumers, watching as prices and technologies change rapidly - and not always for the better, or cheaply. With the Momentus XT series, Seagate has now entered the fray by implementing a hybrid drive - a traditional mechanical rotational drive with a flash drive cache, to create a Solid State Hybrid Drive.

The ethos behind the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive is to offer the random access speed improvements of an SSD using Flash NAND technology, with the affordability and capacity of traditional magnetic rotational drives. The Momentus XT does this by using OS and Application independent technology - Adaptive Memory.

Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive

Product Highlights

• $139USD & $159USD MSRP (320GB, 500GB)

• 2.5" 7200RPM

• SATA 2 3.0Gbps Interface with NCQ

• 4GB SLC NAND Adaptive Memory

• 32MB Cache

• Fluid Dynamic Bearing motor (2.3 bels idle/2.5 bels seek)

• 1.5 seek power / 0. 8W idle power

• 2 disc platters (160Gb ea. Or 250Gb ea.)

• 265k TPI track density

• 394 GPI Areal density

• 9.5 x 69.85 x 100.35mm (HxWxL)

Today we're testing the Seagate Momentus XT in 320GB and 500GB variants, and comparing them against a nice spread of the market - three 2.5" drives: a 5400RPM drive, an MLC SSD and one SLC SSD.