MacBook with a Momentus XT SSD hybrid drive boots and launches Photoshop in 26 seconds
Wondering just how fast the Momentus XT SSD Hybrid drive is? Check out this video of an older 2009 MacBook model that compares performance of the stock 5400 RPM drive and the Momentus XT Hybrid. In the video, the MacBook with the Momentus XT cold boots and launches Photoshop CS4 in just 26.5 seconds, while the stock 5400 RPM drive takes 43 seconds to complete the same task.
Getting an ultrafast hard drive and maxing out the RAM are great ways to get the best performance out of Mac hardware. If your Mac could use a speed boost, it’s certainly worth considering the upgrades as they are far more cost effective than buying a whole new Mac.
The Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB SSD Hybrid is $119.99
and includes free shipping from Amazon. There are also 320GB and 250GB versions available, but they’re only marginally cheaper ($10) which makes the 500GB model by far the best deal.
Seagate XT hybrid got some serious issue even with newest firmware. You can find detail here:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-and/If-you-have-problems-with-Momentus-XT-please-come-in/td-p/59455
Most serious one is freeze and cause me a total re-install Win7.
what is the best SSD for iMac 27 i5?
Momentus XT is faster then other conventional HDD, but it is very noisy and very vibrating…
i have this drive and dont find it noisy at all.. and no vibrations
I find it noisy as well. Especially when the computer resumes from idle. Before any activity I hear that spin up. It is fast I will give it that. But not as fast as my previous setup which was an intel 40gb ssd and an ocz 60gb ssd setup in RAID 0 for a total of 80gb.
80GB wasn’t enough for my primary OS drive so I switched it out to the momentus XT 500. It’s still works great and really the only difference I notice is when resuming from sleep. It takes a bit longer and it seems the spin up is a little laggy. Otherwise love the drive.
All the Momentus does is give you a large super fast cache on the SSD portion of the hybrid disk. All data is actually stored on the hard disk platters. OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD’s have come down in price. They have no need for TRIM support. They are more than double the speed of the Seagate Momentus SSD-Hybrid.
120GB = $249.99
These drives are one of the fastest SSD drives on the market and come with a 3 year warranty. They use the SandForce controller same as the OCZ drives and they are a bit cheaper with larger storage sizes.
Dead silent operation, virtually no heat, super fast!
Up to 285MB/s data rates, Zero Seektime, and 75% less power than a conventional hard disk.
Just make sure you back it up! There will be no warning when it fails. Use SuperDuper or CCC to clone it to an external traditional hard disk as a backup. Or use a Time Machine drive or maybe the Carbonite service.
Boots a MacPro in about 12 seconds and a Lenovo ThinkPad X201 w/Win7 in approx 18 seconds (includes launching Outlook, running logon scripts, etc.
This will make the biggest difference in laptop/desktop performance. Even more than doubling your RAM!
Hey- I have this drive installed and I’m not getting anywhere close to those boot up times…more like 1:03! Please help- i like the extra space but I’ve seen no speed improvement. here are my specs:
MacBook 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo; 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM; OSX 10.6.5.
video of my startup here-
https://files.me.com/mystro2b/7mt4zh
I’ve used an Seagate XT hybrid and can confirm they are very fast, probably the fastest option other than going straight SSD. You will pay about $1500 to get an SSD in 500GB though, and for that price you might as well just buy a MacBook Air with external storage.