Seagate announces the Momentus XT hybrid hard drive

Up until now, we’ve had SSDs for those who wanted the best read and write performances, but the downside was the capacity, as most of us had to make do with a 60GB, since everything else was just too expensive. Seagate’s new Momentus XT hybrid drive gives you the best of both worlds thanks to an embedded flash memory in a regular hard drive. This is the second generation Momentus XT and will be available in stores soon. Seagate haven’t made the pricing official, yet.

Best of both worlds

The drives will be available for desktop and commercial laptops as well and will feature their new Adaptive Memory and FAST Factor technologies. Adaptive Memory technology works by identifying data usage patterns, and then moving the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. Adaptive Memory effectively tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use. FAST Factor technology blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives for faster access to applications, quicker boot-up and higher overall system speed. The Momentus XT is said to be nearly 70 percent faster than the previous Momentus drives. The maximum capacity offered will be 750GB along with an 8GB single-level NAND flash. The drives will also be based on the new SATA III (6GB/s) interface.