Western Digital announced their 2nd quarter 2012 results, with sales of $2bn, compared to $2,5bn from a year earlier. The mere 20% decrease in sales is quite remarkable considering how badly WD’s manufacturing plants were hit during last year’s Thailand floods. In fact, WD did indeed ship almost half the hard drives shipped in the same period last year, with 28.5 million drives in Q2 2012 compared to 52.2 million drives in Q2 2011. Despite this, increase in prices and gross profit margins lead to profits of $145m, compared to $225m last year.

While discussing these earnings call, WD’s CEO, John F. Coyne was asked about ultrabooks and what medium storage will be used in them, given the heavy push from Intel and other OEMs. “I expect ultrabooks to have both hard drives, traditional hard drives and hybrid hard drives and SSDs. So I think there will be, depending on the specific version of ultrabook, you will see all 3 solutions and even in certain models, choices between those solutions in the same model, ” said Coyne (via transcript at Seeking Alpha).

“And we think that the SSD penetration profile will be in very low single digits in a mature ultrabook environment. And then we see an emerging position for hybrids a little early to develop a view on exactly what percentage of penetration, but we see hybrids as a very compelling alternative on the performance side to solid state on bang for the buck. And we anticipate that in large capacity environments, traditional hard drives will continue to be the compelling solution.”

One of the biggest reasons we don’t find Seagate’s Momentus XT in many notebooks as a default, or even optional HDD is because Seagate is the only manufacturer making hybrid drives; nobody else in the industry is making them. The critical mass for hybrid drives hasn’t been achieved simply because there is only one supplier in the market. With WD entering the foray of hybrid drives, the landscape for traditional hard drives could change very soon.

You can check out our review of the latest Momentus XT drive to see how fast it is compared to traditional HDDs vs SSDs.

The Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drives are one of those special drives that many people desire, but haven’t had much experience with. They’re like VelociRaptors, just the name sounds cool enough to want one. But it’s the promise of high performance for relatively low cost that attracts everyone. In the case of the Momentus XT, the low costs are relative to Solid State Drives, which are still prohibitively expensive for many.

So today I’ll be looking at the second generation Momentus XT hybrid drive that promises more capacity, more performance and better reliability than the first generation drives. Unfortunately this performance and capacity increase also comes at a cost of $100 (AED 370) extra.

As you can see, the NAND Flash that’s used to cache frequently used data has doubled to 8GB from the original Momentus XT. The obvious benefit here is that larger capacity for cache means that more of your programs will be running at maximum capacity (of near SSD speeds) most of the time.

Despite the size increase, though, it seems that the Momentus XT still won’t be able to achieve its maximum potential. The reason is that Seagate doesn’t allow any data to be written on the 8GB NAND while in use; only read. Essentially that means that read heavy applications, such as iTunes or any video game will see a lot of benefit as data is mostly read. For those who’ll be working on heavy editing applications, such as Photoshop or Sony Vegas, will still be bound by the write speeds of a 7200rpm drive, albeit at SATA III speeds.

I guess if both real-time read and write access was given to the NAND Flash, perhaps a bigger size would be needed. So these limitations seem more in line with keeping the costs down, rather than technical issues. That said, Seagate has mentioned that they will be releasing a firmware upgrade for these    2^nd generation Momentus XT drives that will, in fact, allow data to be written to the 8GB NAND. So far we haven’t had anything, so this review looks at performance you’ll be getting from units straight of the packaging.

One of the key features of the Momentus XT is the ‘Adaptive Memory Technology’ that’s basically a self-learning algorithm that notice your most used programs and stores their data on the cache. So every time you run those programs again, they will be loaded as quickly as an SSD since the data is being read directly from the 8GB NAND Flash.