Momentus XT as a storage drive

[desura]

Would it be a complete waste to use a momentus XT as a drive for like photo storage and mp3 storage?

 

[bbhaag]

I have one that I use for that. Well it's mostly mp4's but still kinda the same. It was a great deal compared to what was available at the time so I bought it. It has worked out pretty good as a storage drive.

 

[Rakehellion]

Not a complete waste, but pretty much. A solid state drive will help if you have thousands of photos and MP3s, but a hybrid drive like the Momentus XT won't really know what to cache in such a sparse collection of data, so it'll be like using a regular hard drive.

 

[corkyg]

That is absolutley a positive choice. That is how I have my T510 laptop configured - my traveling darkroom. The main OS drive is a Samsung 830 256GTB, and the secondary drive for data and photo storage is a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB. They work very well together and provide all the space I need in a timely fashion. The Momentus XT replaced a WD Scorpio black, same size, but is noticeable snappier. This is my experience for the past 6 months.

So, no, in my experience it would not be a complete waste at all.

 

[desura]

That is absolutley a positive choice. That is how I have my T510 laptop configured - my traveling darkroom. The main OS drive is a Samsung 830 256GTB, and the secondary drive for data and photo storage is a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB. They work very well together and provide all the space I need in a timely fashion. The Momentus XT replaced a WD Scorpio black, same size, but is noticeable snappier. This is my experience for the past 6 months.

So, no, in my experience it would not be a complete waste at all.

Same RPM, et all?

Interesting. Wonder why that is.

With photos, it's not going to be like a frequently accessed program. They're occasionally accessed files.

 

[Rakehellion]

Same RPM, et all?

Interesting. Wonder why that is.

With photos, it's not going to be like a frequently accessed program. They're occasionally accessed files.

If you're accessing the same photos frequently, it'll be much faster.

 

[vbuggy]

I doubt it'd be any faster than a decent HDD as a pure storage drive, unless Rakehellion's scenario occurs.

Personally I've found the Momentums a complete waste of time overall. When they were first released they were touted in-forums like some sort of holy grail of storage and performance, but I could find only one merit for them and that was price - and the more I tried using them, the more I felt that most of the proponents hadn't actually yet run SSD's in their setups yet were convincing themselves that it was worth it. Subsequent upgrades hasn't impressed me either. I dunno. Maybe I have some sort of totally unique way of using PC's :hmm:

 

[kmmatney]

I have 2 500GB Seagate Momentus XTs, as well as about 10 SSDs. The XTs have been great, especially for the price I paid of $59. I did try to use one as the main boot drive in my laptop - it much better that my previous hard drive, but didn't give me the same "SSD" experience that I hoped for. So it is not as good as an SSD, but it still is a very good drive. I placed as the OS drive in my son's desktop, and it works great, and for his usage it's almost SSD-like. My other one is used as a storage drive, mainly for Steam games and videos, and it works great for that as well.

For the price I paid, I'm extremely happy with them, but they are a lot more expensive now.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yeah, it's mostly dependent on usage scenario. With only 4GB or 8GB of Flash, you're basically only going to see an improvement over a non-hybrid drive if you're loading the same 4GB of data all the time. (Say, you play nothing but WoW, and never leaving Azeroth.)

That's assuming the caching works perfectly.

If I wanted a hybrid games/data storage drive, I'd probably mate a 1TB laptop drive with a 32-64GB SSD, throw them in a single 3.5" tray, and set them up as a RST cache/drive. Then at least there'd be enough SSD for the "intelligent" caching software to, hopefully, stage whatever game I've been playing a lot lately and my favorite couple MP3 playlists, and still have enough room to have a write cache and occasionally be dumb.