This is not new news to those of you who keep up with technology, but Seagate’s Momentus XT drive is out and about aimed at laptops and desktops (mostly laptops from what I can determine).
This unusual drive utilises a combination of nand flash and spinning platter, with a learning algorithm that copies frequently used files on to the flash component of the drive. This provides a great improvement in startup times and application opening speeds. According to a mate of mine who has one in his laptop it “absolutely rocks”.
The learing algorithm process seems to me to be similar in nature to the SSD caching technology we are implementing in our RAID cards. It can’t replace the learning process at the RAID card level for servers … because the caching needs to be done at the logical device level, not the hard drive … but Seagate does a good job of reproducing this process at the single drive level for single drive systems.
To me this seems like a great idea. I recently tried to fit all my files on my laptop into a 64Gb enterprise SSD. The performance was outstanding but I just could not get a comfortable fit (and all my files on the machine). I realised that I really can’t live without the 200Gb or so of data that I cart around with me.
So the Momentus, with its large capacity and good speed seems like the perfect drive for me. I get to cart around all the baggage I just can’t leave behind, and put some performance back into the old x61.
Now all I need to do is get Seagate to give me one for a “long term” test 
Ciao
Neil
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