SPCR

dhanson865 wrote:Look at it another way. SSD caching would require at least one SSD per motherboard. Annual sales of motherboards are in the range of 100 million a year but SSDs sold in 2010 were under 7 million and estimates for 2011 are only 15 million.

Some how I think they will be selling more of the Intel Z68 chip set than they will Momentum hard drives... don't you think

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.p ... iscussion/

Apparently the new version is in the works and will be called Momentus XT 2.

I won't hold my breath but I'd welcome the proposed improvements.

I got the 500GB XT for my gaming computer. I still run Vista 64 on this computer and have some serious bootup issues. Vista LOVES to destroy my hard drive at bootup, taking 7-8 minutes before the computer will open an application, and will run other diagnostics throughout the day that are very seek heavy. It will often cause me to load a level in Black Ops so slowly that I get kicked from the server for being unresponsive. I considered an SSD, but didn't really want to bother with the hassle of sorting my data around the SSD and a 2nd storage drive. I considered upgrading to win7 but didn't want to reinstall all my applications again. Vista works except for the occasional slowdown. This Hybrid drive has solved my problem. The computer will boot in just 2 minutes and those seeks that rendered my computer unresponsive for 5-10 minutes at a time, are now swiftly taken care of and the computer returns to idle much faster. Where I measured data rates after bootup of 1-2 MB/second, I now see 5-80MB/s. Loading levels for Black Ops was never really that slow as long as the drive was idle, and this drive is only slightly faster than my old mechanical drive at loading a level, but it is MUCH more consistent. I no longer have the problem with Vista's tools destroying my hard drive in the middle of a game, slowing my level loads down to minutes and getting me kicked from the server.

So, while I agree that this is basically a fast laptop drive, it was exactly what I needed for my Vista PC that would often become unresponsive due to Vista's horrible system tools. Gaming doesn't benefit THAT much from an SSD, putting your steam account on your SSD means you need a big SSD, and having two drives to manage is something I wanted to avoid. This drive was the perfect solution to my specific problem. It may not be for you, as my SSD in my laptop makes general tasks SO much faster than this hybrid drive, but for my use case this drive is the best thing I could have asked for. And for only $80 bucks for 500GB vs. $100 for a 60GB SSD I won't fill it up with just 2 or three games installed.