Seagate Momentus XT: The Speed of an SSD with the Capacity of an HDD

Seagate recently unveiled the Momentus XT, a 2.5-inch hybrid drive that combines SSD technology with a traditional platter-based HDD.

From cars to cameras, everything seems to be hybrid these days, including Seagate's brand new storage drive, combining Flash memory with a magnetic drive. This gives the Momentus XT the best of both worlds, with the speedy performances of an SSD (transfer speeds are announced as 80% higher than regular hard drives), but with much larger storage capacities. In fact, the Momentus XT will be available with the HDD-worthy capacities of 250, 320 and 500 GB.

The 'hard drive' part features a regular hard disk, rotating at 7200 rpm, and 32 MB of cache memory, whereas the 'SSD' part has 4 GB of SLC memory. All of that connects to a computer via a SATA-2 interface.

Unfortunately we don't have any more information about how this hybrid system actually works, and we're keen to get our hands on one to take a look for ourselves.

By the look of the spec, Seagate's Momentus XT drives are likely to be offered as an optional extra in gaming laptops, or with any other system requiring excellent performances and compact dimensions (NAS, mini-PCs etc.).

There's no news on price yet, but this will almost certainly be a critical factor in the take-up rate for this new type of technology.

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