A few years ago it seemed as if Hybrid Hard Drives were the future. Yet after a bunch of announcements and hope today we find ourselves in a world with two distinct markets: HDDs and SSDs. If you're willing to pay the price premium and limit maximum capacity, today's SSDs are very fast and if you choose well, reliable.

For a desktop PC this isn't a tough choice to make. I've been advocating a setup where you have a SSD for your OS + applications and a separate RAID-1 array of 1TB or larger drives for all of your music, movies and photos.

Notebook users don't usually have a ton of drive bays and thus only have room for a single drive. It's not a lost cause though, if your notebook is your only machine you can get away with an internal SSD + external storage whether in the form of a NAS or just something you attach via USB when you're at your desk.

For the very portable users that don't want to lug around another hard drive, or for those who refuse to pay the high dollar per GB rates that SSDs command, there hasn't really been an option other than mechanical storage.

Today Seagate is attempting to change that with its latest Hybrid HDD: the Momentus XT.

Read more...