 I was having a little browse over on eBuyer to look into the economics of getting an SSD (Solid-State Drive) for my Macbook Pro, just to see how much it would set me back. Not surprisingly, SSDs are extortionately expensive, costing around £500 for 250GB. Of course, that price will depend on the performance of the SSD, as well as the brand (budget Chinese brands are of course going to be cheaper). Immediately turned off with the thought of parting with 10 weeks drinking and clubbing money, I stumbled across a hybrid SSD. This model by Seagate - the Momentus XT features 4GB of flash, and a range of hard disk sizes all on one self-contained hard drive unit. This is where the magic happens. The Momentus XT is essentially a standard SATA hard disk, and behaves to the operating system just like that. The OS just sees the hard disk, and not the flash. However, the onboard firmware running on a microprocessor does something very clever: it analyses the areas on the disk which are most accessed and written to, and migrates it from the magnetic hard disk onto the NAND flash. Now whenever the host computer requests that piece of data (remembering that the OS still thinks it's on that area of the disk, and is being 'tricked' by the XT firmware to think it's still there), the XT firmware catches this request and delivers the data from the flash, which it manages by itself. This is such a clever idea! From what I've seen, users are reporting very positive results, with some saying that they are seeing 80-90% of the performance of a real SSD at the fraction of the cost (around £80). Earlier firmware versions were problematic for some users, but those issues seem to have been ironed out in the latest builds. I am very tempted to kit my MacBook Pro out with one of these! |
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