Solid State Drives (SSD) have been around for a decent amount of time but failed to make any major dent in the market. There are two reasons to this. Partly, traditional hard disk drives though antiquated in terms of technology as compared to a SSD still do the job remarkably well and usually last the life of a laptop. My trusty old Dell has been with me since 2005 and its HDD is still going strong. So unless the difference in performance really matters to you (for most consumers it is economics rather then performance) ; SSDs could never really be preferred. Especially when SSDs loose out majorly when it comes to prices.

However a SSD does make a huge difference in terms of data life as well as performance. Its not for no reason that Apple went the SSD route when they unveiled the Apple Air Laptop.

So it would be a no-brainer if you had to choose for a hard disk for your laptops or computers provided costs were not a concern. Seagate has attempted to give us the best of both worlds. The Seagate Momentus XT combines a regular magnetic disk with a small, super-fast solid-state drive (SSD). The smart hard drive only copies the most important / frequently used data on the SSD so it boosts performance. Data that is not required daily or even weekly (when was the last time you listened to that Elvis song that you know you have saved somewhere on the hard drive?) is put on the magnetic disk.

The resulting hard drive boosts the computers speed to almost as good as a full SSD and significantly faster then a traditional hard disk. So if you find your old laptop running out of breath too frequently for comfort, think of the Momentus XT that sells for $249 which includes 750 GB of storage and 8 GB of SSD.