Hard disk maker Seagate has announced a new hybrid drive in the form of the Momentus XT, which pairs a 7,200-rpm SATA (Serial ATA) hard-disk drive with 4GB of SSD and a large 32MB of DDR cache. Seagate promises performance similar to SSDs at a price that is far cheaper than the cost of buying a top-rated SSD.

And the results seem very promising indeed. Mark Wojtasiak, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, told Computerworld: "We booted within five seconds of a SSDs boot time, and we were 15 seconds faster than a 300GB Velociraptor and 36 seconds faster than our 7200-rpm [Momentus] drive."

The Velociraptor is a high-performance hard disk drive from Western Digital that spins at 10,000-rpm and is considered one of the fastest SATA-based HDD around. Seagate says that the Momentus XT was also "significantly" faster at loading applications when compared to either hard disk drive.

At the heart of the magic is Seagate's Adaptive Memory technology that tracks a user's usage trend, and incorporate it with the SSD component to optimize performance. Changes in user behavior over time are also tracked and optimized accordingly as well.

The Momentus XT is not Seagate's first attempt at creating a hybrid disk. An earlier product called the Momentus 5400 PSD failed to sell well. The new Momentus XT is available in capacities such as 250GB, 320GB and 500GB, and priced at just $133, $122 and $156 respectively.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at PC World
- check out this article at Computerworld 

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