In 2008 Seagate introduced their very first hybrid hard drive and while it had many issues and only had a brief time in the market, it was a foreshadowing of things to come. It may not have been overly successful, but you could say that its failures led Seagate to the solutions they introduced in 2010 with the innovative Seagate Momentus XT 500GB. For its time the Momentus XT 500GB’s combination of solid state accessible cache and a reasonable capacity gained it an almost cult like following in the enthusiast community. However, there was still room for improvement and with the new second generation Momentus XT ( now in a larger 750GB form) Seagate truly is pushing things to the next level. With a market that’s increasingly focused upon elevating production and energy efficiency while reducing initial buy-in cost, the idea of hybrid SSD / HDD drives seems to be gaining traction. They tend to offer the best of both worlds and Seagate themselves have stated that within five years they expect 80% of their hard drives to consist of both platter-based and NAND storage components. This is certainly a lofty goal – even for a company with a reputation for innovation – and one that will be difficult to achieve considering the numerous technological and logistical problems which will have to be hurdled. Most importantly, to reach this goal they have to set a very aggressive timeline for themselves with short product / design cycles and aggressive pricing. This in turn gives them a very short window of opportunity to learn from one generation’s mistakes before the next has to be ready for mass production.