Hybrid Seagate Hard Drive Has Performance Issues 67
EconolineCrush writes "The launch of Seagate's Momentus XT hard drive was discussed here last week, and for good reason. While not the first hybrid hard drive on the market, the XT is the only one that sheds the Windows ReadyDrive scheme for an OS-independent approach Seagate calls Adaptive Memory. While early coverage of the XT was largely positive, more detailed analysis reveals a number of performance issues, including poor sequential read throughput and an apparent problem with command queuing. In a number of tests, the XT is actually slower than Seagate's year-old Momentus 7200.4, a drive that costs $40 less."
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
The drives are fine, it's just a firmware issue. They'll fix it in the next few months. It's not like people who bought the drives are screwed because of faulty equipment.
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
Seagate has been crap for awhile now.
You mean like "forever"?
There used to be conner, seagate, and maxtor.
maxtor made 'good' cheap drives.
conner made 'meh' cheap drives
seagate made more expensive 'good drives'. but stopped doing that and started buying other drive companys.
I agree with you about Maxtor, but Conner made SHIT cheap drives. Nothing from Conner Peripherals was ever worth buying. Unfortunately, CP drives were OEM'd due to cost for some time. Seagate has NEVER made "good" drives except for enterprise-class stuff. I grew up in Santa Cruz and so I had a ready supply of used Seagate disks. We used to call them Seizegate because the drives would succumb to stiction constantly. Not a month went by that I didn't have to pull a disk and whack it with a screwdriver to get my system to boot. Once I actually had to pull a cover and manually rotate a spindle it was stuck so hard, and it took significant effort to get it to turn. The same disk burned a trace right off its PCB after that, then I soldered a jumper wire, then it burned off the jumper wire, never hurt anything else in the process but back then computers still contained a bunch of TTL.
(my current fav is hitachi. So long as they dont start making deathstar drives again :P)
That makes me kind of fear them. I just buy WD. So far I've had the best luck with Maxtor and WD over my career.
Re:Why Can't It Just Act As Write-Back Cache? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd love to buy more memory but I already have 4GB (the limit for many machines.)