Gadgetory

this is going to be a relatively quick unboxing this is the Seagate momentous XT and it is an unbagging rather more than an unboxing this is a 320 gigabyte version of the drive but it's available in a few different capacities and this is a revolutionary device the reason is because and you can see that when I open it up it will come out of the bag and 1/2 inches and it will have a SATA interface or SATA 2 rather power and data and then jumpers but so far I haven't shown you anything revolutionary about it what's revolutionary about this is actually what's under the hood this is a magnetic drive that's why you get a nice high capacity at a very reasonable price but it also has a small 4 gig SSD built in now that doesn't mean that you actually get any significant capacity boost you're not adding the SSD for that you're adding the SSD built in in order to get a speed boost so while you won't quite get the speed of an SSD you won't be stuck with the speed of a hard drive now I'm also gonna explain a little bit how all this works we've had cache on hard drives for a very very long time cache acts as a way for the hard drive to take frequently accessed data and throw it on to a much faster storage medium so that for for like a quick rendom read or a quick random write you can use the cache for much faster performance than if you actually had to wait for the disk to rotate for the arm to seek and for it to find that bit of data now what an SSD allows us to do is have a much larger cache typically even on a high-end desktop drive these days you're gonna see only about a 32 Meg to a 64 Meg cache so when we start introducing a 4 gigabyte SSD cache that yeah well it's not as fast as normal cache but it is much bigger and it does give much much better performance for small random reads and writes vs. magnetic okay so basically what you gates aiming to do with this is take some of the very frequently used data things like your OS so you can reduce things like boot time as well as very frequently asked accessed programs you can speed up the performance of this drive and then you can also just have regular performance when you load on your main programs and any sort of large data storage files so what they're doing on a micro scale is what a lot of people have been doing for a while is they're taking a small SSD and using it as their boot drive for their boot drive in their critical applications and then they're installing a separate magnetic hard drive in their system from a storage well now it's all in one unit very cool