Seagate Shipping Its Fastest-Ever Hybrid Laptop Drive

Seagate, once the No. 1 hard disk drive producer in the world and now a close No. 2 to WD, continues to maneuver deeper into solid-state and hybrid SSD-hard disk drive territory.

This week, the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company started shipping Generation 2 of the 750GB Momentus XT, its solid state/HDD hybrid for consumer and commercial laptops. Seagate immediately sanctioned this one as the fastest drive ever made for PCs, which is quite a lofty statement to publicize.

Even though Seagate has gained great credibility over the years, claims such as that one still need to be proven in the field, but one can simply suffice to say this is indeed one quick drive. With an upgrade to one of these XTs, users can easily boost boot-up speed and overall performance to basically turbo-charge their laptop PC.

The Momentus XT, Product Marketing Manager Joni Clark told The Station, is about 70 percent faster than the current Momentus drive version and about three times faster than a traditional hard disk drive. Of course, anything with NAND flash inside it will be noticeably faster than a spinning disk, so that’s a pretty safe statement.

Specifically, the Momentus XT hard drive’s Serial ATA 6G bps interface and 8GB of single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash double the interface and NAND read-write speed of the previous generation, so that’s where the newfound speed is generated.

The XT drive is now shipping in volume worldwide. Manufacturer’s suggested retail pricing (MSRP) for the 750GB drive is $245.

Seven original equipment manufacturers–and you all know who you are–will soon be shipping laptops powered by the new drive. The drive is now available at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect.