Product Reviews Coming Soon: Hybrid Laptop Drive, DroboElite

By | October 7, 2010

It’s my birthday and I’m playing with toys!

Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive

First, I just bought a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive. This drive adds 4GB of NAND Flash to act as an intelligent read cache to existing high density 500GB 7200 spindle-based technology.

I am very excited to be dropping this into my MacBook Pro, so I’ll need to pull together some basic benchmarks on my existing Western Digital Black 7200rpm drive so I can compare the “before vs. after”.

Data Robotics DroboElite iSCSI disk array

I’ve also taken the opportunity to evaluate the DroboElite.  If you haven’t heard, Data Robotics is running an evaluation program, where you can get your hands on the DroboElite for 30 days. Check it out here. This array supports multi-host iSCSI access, which makes it a potential player in offices where one may have more than one server. It’s also VMware certified… a big plus!

I’ve got about 4 weeks to take it for a spin in my environment, with a mix of hosts. It’s going to be tight, but I’ll post here as I check out its ease of use, performance and real world “care and feeding” overhead.

4 thoughts on “Product Reviews Coming Soon: Hybrid Laptop Drive, DroboElite

  1. Pingback: Bill Plein

  2. Blake

    Have you tried putting hybrid drives in a Drobo yet? That sounds like awesome fun.

  3. Bill Plein Post author

    Blake-

    Nope, haven’t tried that. The Seagate I picked up is in my laptop. I don’t think that the benefits of the Hybrid SSD drive would “shine through” on a Drobo, as the Drobo (and iSCSI itself) add latency that would mask the inherent goodness of SSD read speeds.

    I’m really happy with the Seagate Hybrid drive, just haven’t gotten around to writing anything up about it… yet!

  4. Pingback: Out with the Hybrid, in with the SSD | Bill Plein's Blog – Tangential Excursions

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