BAD HARDWARE WEEK

Performance Summary: The Seagate Momentus XT produced some interesting performance results. In the purely synthetic tests designed to look at raw throughput, the Momentus XT generally performed like a high-end, 7200 RPM hard drive--transfer rates typically fell between the WD Scorpio Blue and Seagate Barracuda desktop drive. In the system level benchmarks like those employed in PCMark Vantage, however, once the Momentus XT's adaptive memory technology learned the usage patterns and copied over the most commonly accessed bits of data to the solid state portion of the drive, performance improved dramatically. The Momentus XT was never able to truly match the performance of a true SSD, but its performance when the adaptive memory technology was used was far superior to a standard HD.