Seagate Momentus XT vs Western Digital Scorpio Black

[netgem21]

Hey!

I'm about to order one of these two 2.5" drives but before I do, I just wanted to get some opinions from you!

The Seagate Momentus XT is an HHD (Hybrid-hard drive), part hard drive, part SSD. The idea is that it automatically allocates your most used programs/processes onto the 4GB SSD and everything else onto the 7200RPM disk. However, people complain about noise/vibration levels with these drives. Finally, I've heard that Seagate drives are pretty unreliable, but I've not experienced this, so opinions are welcomed.



However, the Western Digital Scorpio Black is perceived to be a much quieter drive, and more reliable too but it misses out on the Hybrid SSD feature and may generally be a better buy due to the sound/vibration level, price and reliability.



So if anyone has experience of either of these drives, knows about hard drives in general or just has an opinion, please give us a shout!

Thanks

[armadillo]

Hey!
Finally, I've heard that Seagate drives are pretty unreliable, but I've not experienced this, so opinions are welcomed.

I know nothing about the particular drive you are considering. But I have used Seagate drives as internal and external drives for my PC for six years. I have never had one fail. I guess the reports of unreliability arise because people tend only to report failures but not years of problem free use. And if there are a lot of a particular brand in use, there will be a lot of reports.

[mrapoc]

Go for the WD imo unless you can go full SSD

Western digitals or Samsung make the best drives imo

[Steve]

The Seagate has some positive reviews , perhaps people expect it to be quieter but it's still a high speed drive and all the writes are to the HDD.

[D-Dan]

These are generally considered to be about the best drive you can get. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=pd_lpo_ix_dp_am_us_uk_en_velociraptor_gl_electronics?keywords=velociraptor&tag=lpo_ixdpamusukenvelociraptorgl_electronics-21&index=blended

Steve

[netgem21]

These are generally considered to be about the best drive you can get. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=pd_lpo_ix_dp_am_us_uk_en_velociraptor_gl_electronics?keywords=velociraptor&tag=lpo_ixdpamusukenvelociraptorgl_electronics-21&index=blended

Steve

What's the best 2.5" drive?

[Niall]

What's the point in getting that hybrid? I'd get SSD for my main drive and programs and sata for storage. No point in spending extra money on this hybrid that isn't needed. I forgot to add that my most used programs occupy more than 4gb of HDD space. So what good will that drive do? My O/S folder is 15gb give or take, although I don't know how much of that would be shunted to the 4gb drive bit.

[Steve]

Depends whether you've got a laptop with only space for one 2.5in drive, the hybrid gives the best of both worlds in some respects the capacity of the HDD and the read speed for commonly read data i.e apps from the SSD.

[netgem21]

What's the point in getting that hybrid? I'd get SSD for my main drive and programs and sata for storage. No point in spending extra money on this hybrid that isn't needed. I forgot to add that my most used programs occupy more than 4gb of HDD space. So what good will that drive do? My O/S folder is 15gb give or take, although I don't know how much of that would be shunted to the 4gb drive bit.

Hybrid drives are far cheaper than SSDs.

[Niall]

Actually I forgot to edit my post sorry. I checked the prices afterwards. IF they speed things up I see no harm in having one. As I mentioned though, what programs are under 4gb these days that would benefit from SSD? I can only think of useful, but non demanding software like messenger, itunes or AV&firewall stuff, and the security stuff scans the whole drive so it'd be a bit pointless I think (assume).

Still, it's cheap so get it

[Steve]

The review by Anandtech shows clear performance benefits of the 4Gb read cache

here

An ideal single drive for any notebook.

[esh]

Worrying about noise in a notebook? If your system is a performance laptop then it's usually thick enough to obscure most of the noise anyway. Plus hard drive noise has never bothered me. I would not say Seagate are any more unreliable than others. I tend to buy Samsung drives these days, of which I've had 1 die in the past. I've had 2 Maxtor perish, a Seagate, two IBM/Hitachis and six Western Digital (all but one were motor failures). It's not statistically significant, but from my experience I tend to find the Maxtor drives less reliable. They have piled up the bad clusters and had nasty head crashes. The old IBM drives were not great either, but then I have one from 2001 that is still rattling along quite happily, strange humming/whirring and all. Personally I'm not convinced on the Hybrid setup yet, unless you are doing extremely repetitive tasks that are I/O heavy (and this doesn't improve write speed as this is not cached).

[Technical Ben]

These are generally considered to be about the best drive you can get. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=pd_lpo_ix_dp_am_us_uk_en_velociraptor_gl_electronics?keywords=velociraptor&tag=lpo_ixdpamusukenvelociraptorgl_electronics-21&index=blended

Steve

A lot of Raptors, but what about HDDs?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Schleich-14509-Velociraptor-Dinosaur/dp/B0002HZSMQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291207990&sr=8-1

[Rik]

[Gary]

I have a 1TB Seagate in my iMac, you can hear its seek noise, but the machine is so quite you can't even hear the fans running so its not surprising, also its sitting directly in front of you.

[Ray]

 

[Niall]

A lot of Raptors, but what about HDDs?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Schleich-14509-Velociraptor-Dinosaur/dp/B0002HZSMQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291207990&sr=8-1

I noticed that this was one of the top links in google too