Seagate 500GB Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Hard Drive Review

Seagate's Momentus XT is a 2.5" notebook drive of a half-Terabyte in capacity that stands out from the crowd because it contains 4GB of SLC NAND flash. The NAND flash is used as sort of a 'fast access repository' to store commonly used data, though at 4GB, the SSD portion of this hybrid drive accounts for only 0.8% of its total storage capacity. The two platter, 7200RPM Seagate Momentus XT posts an average read latency of 11.0ms, write 13.0ms. Seagate's 3Gb/s SATA II ST95005620AS drive retails for round $156 USD / £90 GBP and requires no special drivers or software.