Seagate Hybrid hard drive

[nO_OnE]

So I just got one of the new Momentus XT Hybrid Drive by Seagate (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pro...ops/laptop-hdd), for my laptop, an Asus G73JH. It was $150 for a 7200RPM 500GB with 4GB of SSD. So far it appears to be faster, I am re-installing everything so I can compare it with my previous drive.

I ran the windows experiance index with it, and it gave the hard drive a rating of 5.9, which is the same as my standard 5400RPM drive.

Just curious to see if anyone else has had any experiance with these Hybrid drives, and how they liked them...

[ntg]

I was thinking of getting a hybrid drive but haven't gotten around to it.

What got my attention in your post...previous drive was a 5400 RPM and new one is a 7200 RPM but you got the same experience index. Even if it wasn't a hybrid drive, I would expect to get better experience rating just because of the faster rotation speed. I find that a bit curious. I once read about how the cache is utilized in hybrid drives and one post indicated that they kinda learn from your previous accesses over time in order to keep the really important, most frequently accessed stuff in the cache. Perhaps the Windows rating methodology (which I assume includes rather random seeks and reads) messes the caching logic up. Have you tried performing any other benchmarks?

[nO_OnE]

I understand the cache, and SSD portion of the drive is going to make it function different, but like you, I am not sure how the windows experiance index is calculated. I have tried running the experiance index several times in a row to see if the drive would "learn" the data the index was passing to it, and still no difference, 5.9 every time.

I have not really ran any benchmarks yet, haven't had the time, and I had some other issues with the laptop. I planned on using Norton Ghost to duplicate the new drive to the old drive, so they would be an exact duplicate for the benchmark (last time I tried it, the boot sector or something didn't copy right so I had to re-install windows and stuff anyways).

If I have the time I will lookup a good benchmark program and see if I can run them on the different drives. Any recomendations for benchmark program?


Assides from running an actual benchmark, the drive appears to be significantly faster. Windows does boot faster (maybe this weekend I can time out the difference). I recently installed Office 2010, and with the Hybrid hard drive I can load any Office 2010 program in under 5 seconds.

[ntg]

I'm aware of Passmark but I don't know any free alternatives (I'm sure there should be some though).

Slightly off topic, ever since I discovered Clonezilla (which is free) I stopped looking around for other cloning software.

[nO_OnE]

After doing some searching I have found that many people are having the same problem with the windows indexing. Even some people with straight SSD HD's are getting 5.9, people with 15,000 and 10,000 RPM drives. I found this post that tells you how to run the hard drive assesment in the command prompt. http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell...rformance.html

Here's the full windows assessment for my Hybrid Drive:


Also, after playing with my laptop more tonight, I noticed that my programs are opening faster. I can open any of the office 2010 programs in less than 1 sec. After opening Visual Studio several times, it first took about 10 - 15 seconds to open, now its opening in about 2 seconds (without opening a project).

[ntg]

Also, after playing with my laptop more tonight, I noticed that my programs are opening faster. I can open any of the office 2010 programs in less than 1 sec. After opening Visual Studio several times, it first took about 10 - 15 seconds to open, now its opening in about 2 seconds (without opening a project).

That happens on my PC as well and I don't think it has anything to do with the drive's cache.

[TheBigB]

No indeed, that's superfetch.

Here's mine (regular 500 GB - 5400rpm):



If I compare them, your real gain is in the write performance.

[Lord Orwell]

any rotational drive is hardcoded in the index to top out at 5.9.