Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HDD

[cj.surrusco]

Looks like Seagate is taking another crack at hybrid hard drives. The benchmarks show that it performs much better than a regular 7200rpm drive.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...061700159.html

Now, I know that it works by moving commonly used files to the 4GB flash memory, but what controls the file movement? Is it done by the hard drive itself, or does it require drivers in the operating system? What I'm basically asking is, how easy will it be to get one of these working on a Linux system?

[Jim_in_Omaha]

Are there any Linux users running this drive? And your opinions?

[vistamacbuntu]

just got mine today. i plan to clone my current install of mint/kubuntu to avoid the hassle of reconfiguration.

hopefully tomorrow.

good luck to me.

[cascade9]

Now, I know that it works by moving commonly used files to the 4GB flash memory, but what controls the file movement? Is it done by the hard drive itself, or does it require drivers in the operating system?

Done by the drive itself, apparently-

The Momentus XT drive installs as easily as a traditional 9.5mm-high notebook drive for new systems or laptop upgrades and, unlike early hybrid drives, operates independently of the operating system and the motherboard chipset.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage...obile_HDD.html

Just a pity its a read only NAND cache (not read/write like an SSD) and only has 1 NAND chip, when SSDs have multipule chips in parallel, so its never going to be as fast as a SSD.

Decent in-depth review here-

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/s...ood-hybrid-hdd

[vistamacbuntu]

I am now using a 500GB Momentus XT Hybrid HDD. My setup is a Thinkpad X200 that used to have a 160GB Hitachi 7200 RPM hard drive. I have a franken-installation of Linux Mint 8 upgraded to Mint 9 (which as most know is based on Ubuntu 10.04) and topped up with Kubuntu (installed separately via Synaptic) with recently updated KDE 4.5. Whew. Suffice it to say, this is not a clean install and boot times were already past a minute just getting to KDM login and maybe another minute to get to my desktop with loaded apps (Pidgin, Skype, Konsole, etc.)

I cloned my HDD using a USB booted copy of Mint and let it run overnight. Note to those who want to do a clone via dd command, it takes time! Maybe it's my hardware, but I mounted my hybrid Momentus XT through an external SATA drive and got an average of 4.8 MB/sec... took about 8 hours).

Swapped drives, booted and it works perfectly.

Booted about 4 times so the SSD portion can "know" the data I use often. I still have some tweaking to do like the expanding the unused partition, but I just wanted to share my impression that it is definitely faster during boot. I'll share more impressions later on if this thread has interest after I've done a bit of daily stuff on my laptop.

[vistamacbuntu]

Repartitioned using GPARTED and was able to increase my home partition to 400GB+. It was like math problems all over again because my home partition was at the leftmost side and had no empty space beside it. Took about 1.5 hours to run.

Things working great. Feels faster.

However, the true test is how I feel about my desktop after 3-5 days of not shutting down. This is when I typically feel swap is being used by some app (Wine? Firefox? Soffice?)

Additionally, it's a little noisier than my previous 160GB Hitachi.

[vistamacbuntu]

Notice that Wine apps (Excel which I still need to use a lot since it's superior to OO's Calc) startup much faster now. Especially when it's the second or third time starting the app.

This is a huge plus for me.

[Carlie Powell]

Lenovo Y550P i7

Having it lockup with a load. It works fine in Win7 with same apps or intense usage. Not sure but it requires a Hard Reboot, the mouse works. I had noticed it during the synaptic download/install. I thought it was jus the installing process but its use, as well. Any ideas guys??

[Carlie Powell]

I got it working it was Nouveau and Nvidia 240M conflict, I got it resolved. I hav it working with Plymouth Splash and 256.x Nvidia driver on preivous hard drive (now external) accessing the same file and operation, so that was it.

[ctothej]

I'm having I/O freeze issues that coincide with the hard drive activity light when the drive tries to prefetch data into cache (I am supposing). It is very annoying and causing usability issues for me. I will be recloning my drive back to a normal 7200 rpm drive soon because of this issue.

I'm on 10.10 x64.