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Hybrid Seagate Hard Drive Has Performance Issues
EconolineCrush writes "The launch of Seagate's Momentus XT hard drive was discussed here last week, and for good reason. While not the first hybrid hard drive on the market, the XT is the only one that sheds the Windows ReadyDrive scheme for an OS-independent approach Seagate calls Adaptive Memory. While early coverage of the XT was largely positive, more detailed analysis reveals a number of performance issues, including poor sequential read throughput and an apparent problem with command queuing. In a number of tests, the XT is actually slower than Seagate's year-old Momentus 7200.4, a drive that costs $40 less."
If there's one thing I've learned with Seagate, it's that they're terrible at fixing firmware issues. Their 500GB hard drives for laptops were notorious for having issues caused by crappy firmware that never got resolved by the time I trashed mine.
The caching and everything is all happening at a level below the OS and the file system, but these tests seem to have all been run in Windows 7 Ultimate x64, whatever that is.
Would another file system (ext4, for example) on Linux/*BSD or HFS+ on Mac OS yield different results, I wonder, w/and w/o swap? Can there be clashing optimization techniques here?
There was an issue with sound with drives around 2001 that they wouldn't fix. Then Dell said something to the effect of "they think our computers are crap, you fix it or we stop buying from you" and it was fixed. Anything smaller than that, and they would ignore it. I did update the firmware, and it made a huge difference in noise.
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