Seagate has begun shipping the next generation of its Momentus XT solid-state hybrid drives, improving upon its predecessor with faster speeds and increased capacity. Whereas the original drive featured a 500GB HDD paired to 4GB of SLC NAND flash and a SATA 3.0 interface, today's update brings a maximum storage capacity of 750GB, with 8GB of SLC NAND flash, and a faster SATA 6.0Gbps interface.
Much of the underlying technology is similar, but Seagate has tweaked its hybrid data management tools and adaptive memory algorithms to boost performance. The latter monitors what applications and data are first loaded into a system and then "learns" to place that data on the SSD for faster read speeds.
Besides these enhancements, Seagate has added what it calls FAST Boot, which cuts a computer's boot time in half compared to the previous generation Momentus XT. The feature basically sets aside a small portion of the solid-state cache for data used during the boot process, where it will remain for the life of the drive, so that your system always boots from flash and not the Momentus XT's spinning disk.
All in all Seagate says the new Momentus XT drive should be around 70% faster than the first iteration, and up to three times faster than traditional HDDs. The 750GB drive is now shipping worldwide with a MSRP of $245.