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NE's AM Shell Shocker...Seagate Momentus XT 500GB hybrid HD--$79 shipped

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Meghan54

Lifer
Newegg's first Shell Shocker of the day, a Seagate hybrid hard drive, the Momentus XT 500GB. It's a hybrid mechanical and small SSD hard drive, priced at $79 shipped, $70 off normal price.

http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellS...1-_-05252012_1



Had one a few months ago and it did work quite well....a bit faster with load times for consistently used programs than a pure mechanical drive.
 
Great price for this drive.

Both this and the faster 750gb hybrid versions seem to be going on sale in the last few weeks, so I guess Seagate is not overcharging due to the floods anymore.

Frys.com as well as Frys B&M also has the 750gb on sale this weekend for 119.00.
 
I noticed that the one Newegg has is the last-gen Hybrid with 4GB SSD, not the newer with 8GB.

But the 750GB is the newer model. Really tempting for $120.
 
Darn, this sounds tempting. I'm looking at getting a 90-120GB SSD and then this pops up. How close is this to a decent (non top of the line) SSD?
 
From the Anandtech reviews it ranks decently--faster than mechanical but not quite to SSD speeds. Of course this depends on your usage profile as well (it can only cache so much obviously).

Definitely pretty happy with mine though. I would love to see this thing with Windows 8, I have an old bench system (older AMD dual core, WD Blue a few years old) and it boots to login and desktop in under 20 seconds (including BIOS loading). I bet this thing with W8 will be very fast.

I think if you can afford the SSD and have your storage plan worked out go for that though. I went with this mostly because I could resize my old drive (640), and then just restore to this one from my WHS with no reinstall or juggling data across drives.
 
Hm, not bad. If I hadn't just bought a 240Gb SSD, I'd consider it...would prefer more cache, though - I'm not sure how well it'd work for games/etc with 4Gb.
 
not to thread crap, or in case for those who missed this daily deal, Amazon has the same thing for the same price (no tax for cali ppl)

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Moment...7986354&sr=1-2

Tax is still owed by CA people, as use tax on our income taxes.

I don't consider this a thread crap any more than someone reminding a person in a thread about "just pirate it for free" that it's illegal to pirate. Regardless of how certain you are that you can evade paying the tax that you're legally obligated to pay, this post serves as a valid reminder that you're still legally obligated to pay the sales tax, so you might want to factor that into your final price determination. -Admin DrPizza
 
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Tax is still owed by CA people, as use tax on our income taxes.

I like you, but you need to stop crapping threads with the same stuff all the time...

On topic:

Great deal, but not really a drive I'd recommend to buy for a laptop unless you don't care about battery life. It consumes a lot of power.

EDIT:

Also, it has a very aggressive APM like the Western Digital drives. If the drive is inactive for a couple of seconds, it will park the head/make the drive go to sleep and you can't turn it off or set it to sleep in a longer time in Power Options. Basically, it's a meaningless drive if you're looking for ultra-responsiveness because you have to constantly wait for the drive to unpark the HDD heads and that takes a few seconds, not to mention it makes power consumption skyrocket.

Again, I don't recommend this for a laptop. If you don't need a ton of space and have some extra money, wait for one of the deals on the $200 256GB Crucial m4s instead.
 
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Also, it has a very aggressive APM like the Western Digital drives. If the drive is inactive for a couple of seconds, it will park the head/make the drive go to sleep and you can't turn it off or set it to sleep in a longer time in Power Options. Basically, it's a meaningless drive if you're looking for ultra-responsiveness because you have to constantly wait for the drive to unpark the HDD heads and that takes a few seconds, not to mention it makes power consumption skyrocket.

Well hell. I've been using one in my laptop for a while, but it's stationary. I always did wonder why it wasn't as responsive as a desktop. Would like to read up on this, got any links?
 
Well hell. I've been using one in my laptop for a while, but it's stationary. I always did wonder why it wasn't as responsive as a desktop. Would like to read up on this, got any links?

It's a well known problem but one WD, Seagate, and other manufacturers have failed to acknowledge.

Putting the drive to sleep every few seconds not only completely defeats the purpose of power savings because when the drive wakes up it'll use a considerable amount of power as it unparks the head, but it also puts a lot of strain on the drive's mechanical parts. You also have the issue of the drive being unresponsive for some seconds as the process of waking up the drive takes place. Another issue for those that are very noise sensitive is that when the HDD is powering on it's when it's the loudest, and you may hear some clicking and the drive spinning up for a few seconds. Basically, it's a horrible idea.

You can turn this "feature" off if you use a program that can disable the drive's APM settings.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/manual-en/AamApm.html
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html
 
Does the SD28 firmware address the aggressive APM? I looked around the official Seagate Momentus XT forum, and SD26 seemed to fix a lot of problems, including the clicking from constant head parking. Then SD28 came out, and there are users trying to downgrade to fix random lagging, which was reintroduced. I'm a little leery about using firmware that I got from a file sharing site.
 
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