Momentus XT - Hybrid Drive Technology

 So here I'm back, willing to puke over the internet some of my thoughts about random things. This time you got a chance to read about a very interesting piece of hardware, possibly setting the starting point of a new era in data storage: the Hybrid drive technology developed by Seagate.
Basically, these new (or not so new at the time being) hard disks are traditional 2.5" disks (therefore meant mainly for mobile users), spinning at 7200 revolutions per minute, but featuring an extra 4GB (for each of the available models, in 250, 320 and 500GB sizes) of fast Solid State storage.
An internal algorithm provides to move the most frequently used chunks of data inside the fast memory, efficiently increasing the performance over the most frequent tasks.
As a matter of fact, the use of this disk made boot times on my laptop (i7 720QM, 8GB RAM, GT 335) drop from ~1 minute to 26 seconds, and loading frequently used apps (Outlook, firefox, skype, photoshop) is really snappy now (Firefox, stuffed with plugins and addons, loads nearly instantly).
A very interesting point is that the user has no control over the algorithm handling the Solid State part of the drive, which together with the mechanical plat, appears as a single unit to the operative system. This transparent and efficient system gives you a great boost in performance, for a little bit higher price than traditional hard disks (320GB model was priced 99euros on ox.ee). Below is a result of HDTune benchmark on the 328GB model I own, showing a stunningly constant 100MB/s transfer rate (read) and 9ms of access time.

This said, it is also necessary to mention the downsides of such disks. This includes mainly some major firmware issues that Seagate seemed unable to solve after the past 3 firmware updates, and which still interest most of the Apple users and many PC users, experiencing weird behaviors. These include platter spin-downs, weird chirping sounds and faulty power and acoustic management which might lead to constant annoying system freezes.
Luckily, my drive seems to be ok, even though I still notice some weird random disk activity, but yet it performs as expected.
Less lucky are all the people posting here, on the official Seagate support forums. It really seems that Seagate doesnt really know which way to turn, and despite some well-advertised presence of support people on the forums, the issues are yet to be solved.
The very issue seems to be within the drive's advanced power management, causing the drive to spin down randomly, and taking ages to spin back up, causing systems to freeze.
Battery life also drops a lil' bit after mounting this drive, but given the poor stamina that I could squeeze out of my laptop before, I really don't care too much if now I can't get over 1h:30m out of a single charge.
All in all, Seagate's Momentus XT line is a highly recommended product, but only given that you are ready to encounter some trouble in the effort of making it working correctly on your system. Anyway, a huge speed boost is granted, making this possibly the upgrade with the highest performance gain over cost ratio available today. Your mileage may vary, of course.