Seagate claims world's fastest laptop drive

The Momentus XT stores the most commonly accessed data in SSD

Seagate has officially announced its Momentus XT, a hybrid hard/solid state drive (SSD) that it claims is the world's fastest 2.5in drive for laptops.

The device is designed to offer performance comparable to a costly Flash SSD, but with the greater storage capacity and lower price associated with standard hard drive technology, according to Seagate.

"We see the Momentus XT as a game changer, a product heralding a new generation of hard drives that combine SSD and HDD capabilities so that laptop users don't have to make trade-offs on speed, cost or capacity," said Dave Mosley, vice president of sales and marketing at Seagate.

The Momentus XT achieves this by combining a 7,200rpm drive with 4GB of SSD storage, and using built-in algorithms to put the SSD's speed to best effect. This is independent of the operating system or any applications used, the firm said.

Seagate's Adaptive Memory technology intelligently monitors application and file requests, and puts the most commonly accessed data in the SSD, where it can be accessed much faster than from the magnetic disk.

The Momentus XT is 80 per cent faster than a conventional 7,200rpm drive, according to Seagate, and a laptop will boot twice as fast as one with a typical 5,400rpm laptop drive.

The drive is shipping into the channel and to system vendors now, and Asus has announced that it will offer it as an option for its new Republic of Gamers G73Jh laptop.

The Momentus XT is available in 500GB, 320GB and 250GB capacities, with suggested retail prices of $156 (£108), $122 (£84) and $113 (£78) respectively.