I put one of these drives in my MBP i7, not as a boot drive, but as a replacement to my optical drive for use in storing virtual instrument libraries. I installed an OCZ Agility 240gb drive as my boot drive. It was a real toss up as to what would serve me best. What I really wanted was a 500gb SSD drive to serve as my optical drive replacement, but the prices are still too crazy right now. I have discovered that the boot time is er, ok. As I have some of my virtual instrument libraries stored on the SSD boot drive, I have to constantly battle having enough space on that drive. My optical replacement: Momentus XT 550gb has been filled up to 90% since day one.

What I have experienced as the best performance gain from having my OCZ 240 gb SSD boot drive is application start up, but I could get that same performance gain from having a second Momentus XT 500gb drive serving as my boot drive, which is why I have just purchased a second one recently. I’m in the process of getting my energy level up again to want to tear apart my MBP to go through this tedious process all over again!

My next experiment will be using two Momentus XT 500gb drives in my MBP i7 and using my OCZ Agility 240 SSD as an external 1394b drive for virtual instrument libraries.

Yup, I shoulda waited on the OCZ Agility drive, but it does run cooler than the Momentus XT.

are you aware your system is crammed full?

I’m wondering if my girlfriend’s OS X desktop is still the worst I ever saw. But yours appears still a bit sorted

Anyway, I’m just waiting for seagate to bring the same hybrid option for a combo of 2.5″ 15k drives with 8GB SLC. The price difference is so nicely low and I don’t think we’ll see cheaper, easier self-tuning storage tiering for a long time to come.

Florian

If the footprint is larger then like any cache overflow situation, the cache will be thrashed. In this case a lot more writes to the cache, which leads to the question of are they doing any wear leveling or not?

Robin,
Do you still have the drive?
Can you use it as your daily system drive and let us know how things pan out over a few weeks of use?

Thanks

If data is in cache, the response time is orders of magnitude better than if you have a cache miss and have to go get it off the spinning brown stuff. The algorithms that support the cache are the stuff of multi-million dollar patent fights. Things like LRU, MRU, and pre-fetch separate cache from mere buffer.

Whether an app on a particular mac starts in 5 seconds or 6 isn’t the point.

The design is unique, and it can’t help but improve performance for certain workloads. Like SSD’s however, the challenge I think will be knowing which workloads gain most from it.

For laptops, it’s just a no-brainer though as long as the costs are not out of line.

The best videos – imho – when it comes to showing the performances a drive can bring are done by comparing two identical setups w/ different drives

PS : i’m not certain that a reboot cleans / empties the cache but Onyx does that pretty well –> http://www.titanium.free.fr/index_us.html

Though, I wonder how it response to defragmenting of the filesystem. Hopefully, if you defrag after months of use, it doesn’t take more months of use for it to adjust to new “hot spot” locations.

The first run in the video was the first startup on the XT. That should reflect what that drive does with no SSD caching. It is also in line with what I’ve observed – but did not video – on my Hitachi 7200, 500 GB drive system drive. I re-ran the FCP startup test after re-booting the system to clear the caches. Instead of 10 seconds it took 17 – still much faster than even my 10k VelociRaptor.

Other sites will detail timing and power. My approach is to look at the technology and what it delivers to people who don’t read tech sites like AnandTech. While the XT certainly has room for improvement it is the first hybrid that delivers improvements that most civilians will appreciate.

Robin