[clarkey]

Is anyone using one of the new Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD drives in the 10v? Does the 10v benefit at all, given its bus speed limit?

I'm weighing buying a WD Scorpio 5200 RPM to get the benefit of silence and relatively low heat generation against the potential performance of the hybrid SSD.

Would appreciate your anecdotal experiences, thoughts and opinions.

Thanks!
- Jeff

[Mykii]

I've just installed a 500 momentus xt. I haven't got my system running quite yet, but I'll let you know when things work!!

[reflex]

I can't comment on the hybrid drive specifically, but even with the 10v's 1.5Gbps limit, fast SSDs should still be fast.

[clarkey]

As an update to this thread, I went ahead and bought a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive for my Dell mini. I upgraded the drive before installing OS X, so I can't give you any comparative anecdotal observations, but I can say that I am VERY impressed with the performance of my machine.

I'm actually blown away by how well this works. I wanted to put this machine together as a travel machine for importing my photos using Adobe Lightroom. My intention was to import and catalog while traveling, then import the catalog into my iMac once I got back home for final processing.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this works. Import and flagging the good photos works great, and even using the develop module is more than acceptable performance-wise. If it weren't for the limited screen space, I would otherwise be very comfortable using this machine for moderate use all the way through from camera to final JPG. Posting the odd photo from the mini to my blog while on the road is certainly doable.

That said, I don't know how much of this is thanks to the hard drive upgrade, the memory upgrade (I also put in 2 GB) or just OS X itself. In any case, if anyone is considering the hybrid drive for their setup, I'd definitely recommend it.

[reflex]

Thanks for the update. I hope the Seagate hybrid keeps working well for you.

[Mykii]

I've done well with my XT. I haven't had much experience with these Mini's --I just bought two Mini 9's and my own 10v. It seems like it does well, I can't tell if it's sucking my battery down, or if my battery just sucks. I'll have to do a couple control tests in the future... really just need a battery, it doesn't hold up 2 hours in class with everything off. Win 7 seems to hesitate quite a bit for me, have you had that at all?

[reflex]

Li-ion batteries degrade with time and use, so I expect all Mini 9 batteries are showing signs of age by now.

Newer, less-used 10v batteries should be better, but they're not exactly fresh off the assembly line either.

[Mykii]

Well, i ordered a 128ssd and a 6 cell battery for my 10v... hopefully that will give me the range I need power wise... installing osx should probably help as well right? I think my XT will be transferred to another mini when I get the chance

[knownuntogod]

Bought Momentus XT and a cheap sata to usb caddie. Used Super Duper to backup my current install and then ran NetBook Installer after. Swapped it out, and was flawless upgrade! Some issues you should be aware of with this drive: Most definitely noisier than the stock drive. Mine is a constant spinning sound (which I expected from going up to a 7200rpm drive anyway) but it is not offensive or seem out of the ordinary. I agree with what most people say in that I really have not noticed battery or heat drains and gains. Some important things to consider about this drive: It takes about 2 days to a week to fully utilise the flash SSD part of the HD to learn what files you use the most. This aspect of the drive is not controllable, it is part of the firmware. (you cannot delete it with partitioning etc) I made a point to reboot often and although I have not strictly timed it, it does seem much faster booting now than the previous drive. From what other people have said in other forums, boot up time is not as huge an improvement on OSX as you would see in a machine running windows, but its still great to be in OSX in around 20-30 seconds. No noticeable improvement in apps like iTunes though... i have a 200gb+ library and often performance drags due to it being a *cough* shoddy program *cough* to deal with such quantities. Most apps, especially Chrome are even speedier to launch.

OK here's a big issue you could face: Nearly all of the drives at time of writing are still shipping with firmware 'SD23' or under. There have been loads and loads of reports of beachball activity caused while the drive speeds up and down. (I updated my firmware only a few hours into having the drive so could not comment on those problems myself) The new SD24 firmware fixes this problem but guess what i discovered the hard way... Seagate only have a windows app to update it... After much research I can honestly say THE easiest/won't take all day and night, way to upgrade the firmware on osx is to take the drive out (or ideally before installing it) put it into any machine running windows as a slave drive and update it that way with the seagate firmware upgrade windows app. Honestly it took under 5 minutes and i just popped it right back in my mini10v without issue.