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It took 11 paragraphs and 80% through the article to finally discover whether this was a 3.5" or a 2.5" drive. Terrible. That is the single-most important factor to describe a drive and this author buries at the bottom.

 chase, on 29 November 2011 - 12:09 PM, said:

Meh. I think it's important to know if it *is* a 3.5" drive because that precludes its use from many scenarios. The fact that it *isn't* a 3.5" drive isn't as noteworthy because it'll fit in more places.

Conversely, the height isn't mentioned at all.

 chase, on 29 November 2011 - 12:09 PM, said:

Actually, "Momentus" has been Seagate's name for laptop drives for quite some years now.

 Norton, on 29 November 2011 - 12:37 PM, said:

While true, it's not something I'd expect a random reader to know.

And to follow up my own post: The 750 is listed at 9.7mm thick, compared to 9.5mm for the 500. It's also allegedly 0.2mm longer. Uh. The specs also list the width as "2.760mm (70.10 in)" which is just baffling.

I just got one of the 500s a couple of weeks ago. The first one failed in 12 hours inside my mini. The replacement is undergoing burn-in on my much-easier-to-service MacBook.

 bastion, on 29 November 2011 - 12:47 PM, said:

Yes, baffling, unless you happen to notice that 70.10 mm is exactly equal to 2.760 in -- or unless you happen to be devoted to making snarky comments about this product, in which case typos (such as unit dyslexia) always make convenient targets when shoring up empty arguments.

My gripe would be that Seagate are cheap bastards, putting just 8 GB of NAND in their drives -- OWC sells 120 GB solid state drives for less than this kludge, so it's hard to see how Seagate could be anything but cheap for not putting at least 32 GB of solid state alongside their hard disk. Hmmm... maybe unit dyslexia is contagious and they actually paired an 8GB hard disk with 750 GB of NAND

Till this day I have yet to encounter a Seagate product that I retire. All Seagate products I have had the past 10 years all died in the job.

 bastion, on 29 November 2011 - 12:33 PM, said:

This is Macworld. Although most Macs come with 2.5" Drives, 3.5" is not necessarily dead yet. He's right, author should have just state its form factor.

 aestival, on 29 November 2011 - 03:42 PM, said:

Honestly, I didn't care enough to happen to notice that. I figured it was a typo. I was, as noted, far more concerned about the thickness. That's what'll (potentially) keep it out of certain models. Happily it's only a hair thicker than the previous models; should be well within tolerance. (Don't attribute to snark what could easily be idle bemusement.)

 anstormacworld, on 29 November 2011 - 04:10 PM, said:

Doesn't matter whether 3.5" drives are "dead" yet. A 2.5" drive can be fitted into a 3.5" bay with the use of a simple bracket that costs a few bucks. As I said, I think it'd be important to note if it was a 3.5" drive because that would preclude its use in the overwhelming majority of Macs in use and being sold today. It's less important to note that it's a 2.5" drive because a 2.5" drive can be used in every Mac made in the last 8 years except for the Airs.

Too little, too late, I think.

The original Momentus XT has been around for years; it should be on its third or fourth revision by now, not its second.

And the price is just too high for how little you get. 8 GB of integrated SSD? $250? For that price I could get an OWC data-doubler bracket and a 120 GB SATA-3 (6 Gb/s) SSD off NewEgg. That would make *all* my apps launch lightning quick, not just my boot times, which frankly I don't care much about. Sure, I'd lose my optical drive and simply be reusing my existing 5200 RPM disk, but the difference would be astounding for everything but boot tests.

 lordPatton, on 29 November 2011 - 08:29 PM, said:

Then you're free to choose one of the other hybrid drives on the market, yeah?

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You've misunderstood. There's special code in the firmware to handle the boot-time case but the benefit of the NAND doesn't only apply to that. If, like me, you almost never reboot it's not a problem. The drive is still going to handle the flash as an adaptive read cache for the data you *are* using. It's a tradeoff; you're paying more than you would for a vanilla HD but much less than you would for a large SSD. What you get in return is SSD-level performance for the files you access routinely, whether you recognize that those are the ones you're using a lot or not.

 bastion, on 30 November 2011 - 03:33 AM, said:

Was that really necessary?

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No, I realize the SSD portion can do more than just help boot times. I'm saying that with only 8 GB of SSD, it won't do much more than that. 8 GB is right around the install size for OS X. I don't know about you, but I have tens of GBs of apps that I care more about launching. The fact is there will be plenty of files that one would want to be on the solid-state portion that won't be.

That might be acceptable if the price were lower or there weren't good alternatives, but that's not the case. (no other hybrid drives, but lots of SSDs and internal mounting systems).

 lordPatton, on 30 November 2011 - 05:23 AM, said:

About as necessary as that to which it was a response. The Momentus XT was introduced 18 months ago; not "years" as you claimed. Aside from that, what does it mean to say a product "should" or "shouldn't" have passed a particular number of iterations in a given amount of time?

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You're still misunderstanding. The firmware in the drive tracks and caches the files you're actually using. If you're not booting your machine routinely it's not going to waste the SSD on the files that are used during boot and hardly ever again after that. It's going to cache the data for the apps and files that you *do* use.

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As I said, it's a tradeoff. I don't know of anyone doing a 750GB SSD in a 2.5" form factor, so to be comparable let's look at roughly 500GB.

OWC sells the non-hybrid 500GB Momentus for $120 and the XT for $148. That means you're paying $24 for 4GB of NAND. That's going to get you the 4GB of data you're reading most often at SSD speeds. If you want everything at SSD speeds, you're going to be paying $800 for 480GB of usable space. So you're paying a little extra for much faster access to the files you access frequently (again, whether you know those are the ones you're accessing a lot or not) instead of a LOT extra for much faster access to everything, no matter how much benefit you actually get from it.

Please don't think I'm trivializing the impact of a pure SSD; I put one in my notebook a while back and haven't regretted it for a second. I know what the impact is. But I've also got experience with the Momentus XT. I'm inferring from your comments that you don't, and I think you're underestimating how substantial the benefit of those few GB of well-managed read cache is. Is it as fast as a pure SSD? Not even close. But for tens of dollars it's substantially faster in day-to-day use than a traditional HD.

A final note on price. Apparently the original press release for this drive asserted a sub-$200 price. I wonder how much the change is related to recent events in Thailand that have screwed up the economics of the tech sector across the board. (Which pales, of course, to the massive impact on the Thai people.)

 bastion, on 30 November 2011 - 06:43 AM, said:

I don't think I'm misunderstanding that the XT only has 8 GB of storage. What if I have more than 8 GB of data and apps that I use every day?

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cool, so we agree. It's not a matter of character we're talking about here. It's what works for each person.

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Pure SSD isn't the alternative I was referring to.

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That's probably very true. I bet it works well. And if the price delta really were just $28, it would be more persuasive to me.

It depends how you look at it. In my case, the comparison is between a new XT for ~$250, or a combination of 120GB SSD and OWC Data Doubler bracket to go in the optical drive slot, again for about $250 (I'd keep the spinning HD I currently have for storage).

I'm not saying mine is the only correct perspective, (I don't need the optical drive, nor 750 GB of storage, nor a 7200 RPM drive). But from where I'm sitting the combination of features and price the XT offers is no longer compelling.