Seagate Momentus XT Review

It will also be interesting to see whether Seagate rolls out Hybrid drives on its desktop models as well in a near future especially on enterprise ones like the 15K Savvio or the Cheetah drives - now that would be tasty. Alternatively, Seagate could use it to boost performance at the lower end of the spectrum without increasing spinning speed or heat dissipation.

As for the bottom line, well, Seagate has, in the Momentus XT, a winner, the fastest 2.5-inch hard disk drive on the market, one which will be at ease both in a portable environment and in a data centre. Ultimately, it is a hybrid storage solution, one that offers significant gains under the right circumstances.

However, if you can afford to run TWO hard disk drives in one configuration (e.g. in a HTPC or in a DTR laptop), then it may be worth investigating RAIDing two traditional 500GB 2.5-inch hard disk drives instead which could cost less and provide you with better performance and more space immediately.

Find out more about the Momentus XT on Seagate's pages here and here. As a last word, though, we were astonished to see that out of the 30 or so shops that list the Seagate Momentus XT drive we tested, no one, apart from Insight, had it in stock.