Hybrid HDD (Momentus XT) or better CPU?

[OddballMV]

I've been looking at configuring a laptop and on the options my base spec is a standard 5400rpm 500 or 750gb hard drive and an Intel 3210m. If i were to spend a little extra would i see better value in upgrading to a 7200rpm drive (or further to the Momentus XT) or getting a better CPU?

Bearing in mind i'm not a gamer, just a fairly quick (and impatient) general user.

[HK6]

I think you would see more value in a faster hard drive than a faster CPU. In my experience, the hard drive is really the bottleneck of most PCs. If you were willing to spend the money, I would opt for the 5400 RPM drive, then upgrade it to an SSD. The one thing to make sure of, if you plan to do that, is make sure that the laptop supports SATA 6 Gbit/s (rev 3).

[cxz]

Yeah thats an i5 so general use its got it covered. I'd say go ssd since they much cheaper now, then you could put music and movies or w/e on an external drive. I have the momentus and its pretty fast, but an ssd would smoke it.

Also if you buy the cheap hdd you can make that the external drive, so you dont have to spend a ton of money on an external right now.

[amintha1992]

go with a momentus XT... no questions asked.....

[OddballMV]

Interesting mixed responses. I have though about an SSD and then having an external drive for music etc. but I've always though i would get annoyed keep plugging it in everytime i want to listen to a track. My thought was if the Momentus XT is even close to the SSD speed then it would be worth not having the hassle of having to manage two drives, one 750gb drive that is reasonably fast does sound nice.

I'm hoping the Core 3210m will be enough, i have a first gen i5 in my current laptop and the third gen 3210m looks like a decent upgrade. I think I do push my laptop, I've been frequently maxing out my 3gb of ram while surfing the internet and things.

[WaspishVyper]

Interesting mixed responses. I have though about an SSD and then having an external drive for music etc. but I've always though i would get annoyed keep plugging it in everytime i want to listen to a track. My thought was if the Momentus XT is even close to the SSD speed then it would be worth not having the hassle of having to manage two drives, one 750gb drive that is reasonably fast does sound nice.

I'm hoping the Core 3210m will be enough, i have a first gen i5 in my current laptop and the third gen 3210m looks like a decent upgrade. I think I do push my laptop, I've been frequently maxing out my 3gb of ram while surfing the internet and things.

Does your laptop have an optical drive, cause you can replace that with an ssd and get an external optical drive for not very much. If your maxing out RAM by just surfing a new cpu probably wont make much difference so you might need to increase the amount of ram you have.

[OddballMV]

On the new laptop i'm looking at i'll probably go for 8gb of ram anyway so that's not a worry.

I'm really not sure that an SSD is worth paying extra for an external optical drive, would it really make that much difference over the Momentus XT?

[Wats]

Even though you can get to and remove your CPU you can't just upgrade your laptop's CPU, just can't. It was designed and built to work with what it has. Go with the XT.

[IdeaStormer]

I've heard nightmares with the Momentus XT, its great at the beginning but after a while it starts to lag big time, I haven't used it but have heard a few nightmares where users litterally tossed those drives out. Something to do with the SSD cache not moving or caching data as promised after a drive is used for a long time (~6months or more). Anyone actually using it? What's it doing for you?

Maybe they have fixed it but the horror, search for "Seagate Momentus XT lags"

[cxz]

I have but no problems over here. As long as you dont burn cd or dvd a lot then an external drive will be quite cheap. My rosewill is slow as balls, but cheap and reads everything pretty fast. I have personally never owned a SSD, but my friends SSD was significantly faster than my reg HDD. The momentus won't make any difference until you run a program a few times, but then it gets speedy. The flash probably doesn't help much in games since it is such a small amount.

[OddballMV]

Even though you can get to and remove your CPU you can't just upgrade your laptop's CPU, just can't. It was designed and built to work with what it has. Go with the XT.

I mean buying a new laptop. I'm looking at PC Specialist in the UK so you pick the CPU, HDD etc. so i'm wondering what is best to go for.

[OddballMV]

I've heard nightmares with the Momentus XT, its great at the beginning but after a while it starts to lag big time, I haven't used it but have heard a few nightmares where users litterally tossed those drives out. Something to do with the SSD cache not moving or caching data as promised after a drive is used for a long time (~6months or more). Anyone actually using it? What's it doing for you?

Maybe they have fixed it but the horror, search for "Seagate Momentus XT lags"

Thanks for the heads up, a lot of the posts seem to be on the older generation drives and firmware releases, mostly during late 2011. I'm hoping they would have solved that by now.