Seagate Reveals a New Line of Hybrid Hard Drives, Discontinues Momentum XT Drives

For the past few years, the primary focus of Seagate was to improve its Momentus product line, which combined a significant amount of flash storage with the old 7200 RPM hard disk drives. These hybrid hard drives (HHD) offered a larger capacity with SSD-like performance and boot times. The rivals Samsung and Hitachi also entered the HHD market, however, Seagate was way ahead of this competition.

As of now, Seagate is eying to introduce the third generation of Momentus XT product line. The new hybrid drives will bring to the table a series of improvements. First off, Seagate decides to drop the Momentus XT brand. So the new models will not be designated with the same tag. Instead, the HDD manufacturer introduced these drives as ‘Laptop SSHD’, ‘Desktop SSHD’, and ‘Laptop Thin SSHD’.

The three models have different form factors and are designed for different host systems. The Laptop Thin SSHD uses 7mm form factor and targets ultra-thin laptops and notebooks. The Laptop SSHD is 9.5mm and the standard desktop model is 3.5 inch. These hybrid drive models employ the same 8GB NAND that you find in the second generation Momentus XT HHD drives.

The new SSHD brought one major improvement to the old Momentus XT drives. The new models could now perform write caching, thus accelerating the write operations. The old Momentus XT products only cached reads not writes. Further, the 8 GB NAND would be a sufficient buffer size to cache almost 100% of data of a typical corporate user.

Seagate’s SSHD requires lesser time to wake up from hibernation as compared to HDDs and the second generation Momentus XT drives. Seagate plans to introduce more SKUs for its SSHD models. The company intends to stop production of its notebook 7200 RPM drives to shift the focus to new SSHD parts (500GB 7mm drive, a 1TB standard notebook drive, and 1-2TB disks).