Drive to a new level

We generally don't do reviews of components here, but every now and then there's an idea or a product that makes us squeal in excitement. The second generation of Seagate's Momentus XT laptop hard-disk drive (HDD) promises to be that. Seagate has managed to make a laptop HDD exciting by promising tremendous performance improvements without breaking the bank and we'll get to how they do that in a moment. Traditional hard-disk drives consist of discs or platters with magnetic heads that move across the surface to read and write information. The speed of the disk is directly correlated to how quickly these platters move and is measured in RPM (for example, 5,400RPM or 7,200RPM). The newer solid-state drives (SSD) are storage devices that keep the data on flash drive and are considerably faster — partly because they don't contain moving parts. There are, of course, many more complexities but this is a simple differentiation between the two storage technologies. SSDs are becoming more commonplace these days and these are featuring in Macbook Air and the new Ultrabooks, but their cost per GB of data remains considerably higher than your traditional HDDs and they come in smaller capacities too. To combat this, Seagate's Momentus XT features a small SSD-like storage, at 8GB, on a traditional 750GB HDD — as a hybrid solution of sorts. This is actually the second generation of the Momentus XT. The first featured only 4GB of flash storage and had a capacity of 500GB. The Momentus XT features Adaptive Memory technology, which "learns" from your usage habits and stores the most frequently accessed files on the flash storage in order to improve performance. In addition to the system boot files, this would be the applications you use the most, such as web browser, office suite applications and music players. The rest of the files which haven't been given priority or are less frequently accessed are placed on the traditional hard drive. The result is a machine that boots considerably faster and improves performance in your daily usage. The improvements start kicking in after you spend time using the machine, though — this would be your second or third reboot and, say three or four hours of machine usage. While the time saved is only a few seconds — depending on the application, of course — the performance improvement is considerable and visible. Google Chrome starts up almost instantly and the time to launch Adobe Photoshop is reduced as well. On the contrary, these performance improvements may not be visible when you are copying large files as that's when the device reverts to the traditional hard drive. But even then, spinning at 7,200RPM, the Momentus XT beats most other hard drives shipping with laptops that clock in at 5,400RPM — that is, unless you have custom-ordered a faster 7,200RPM one (in which case, performance is at par). If you are looking to upgrade your hard drive, ask your local computer store to clone your existing drive on to this before making the switch. There is a bunch of free software you can use to do that. Alternatively, you could even use the upgrade as a reason to start with a fresh installation. The Momentus XT cannot (and does not) match an SSD in terms of overall performance, but for those who cannot afford an SSD or can only have one drive in your system and need the extra space, it does offer an excellent halfway solution. The Seagate Momentus XT is priced at Dh650. Bhavishya Kanjhan is a digital marketing professional and an early adopter of all things digital. Follow his tweets on @bhavishya