I wrote a while back about the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive, which purports to combine the advantages of a solid state drive with the low cost of a conventional drive. It works very well!
I decided to take the next step to see if I could wring a little bit more performance out of the thing. Since last fall’s build as a single-drive system, the desktop had become storage-rich. Besides the recently added Momentus XT there’s the original 750 GB Western Digital and a Seagate 1 TB, the latter used, well, for not much of anything. Relocating the data from the Momentus XT should allow Seagate’s algorithm to place OS and application files on the XT’s flash for lightning-fast reads.
There was only several hundred GB of data to move but it took a few days of here-and-there time to get the job done safely and completely. The system is used for real work. There were backup routines to change (and test!), path dependencies to chase down, stuff like that. But eventually it was done – with the bonus of some much-needed cleanup and organization.
So, what was the result? Windows 7 Professional boot times – BIOS to desktop – are on the order of 25 seconds. Ambitious application loads, full Photoshop for example, are down to just a few seconds. The system is powered down within 15 seconds of clicking Shutdown. I’m thinking these may even improve over time.
