Not long ago we took a look at Seagate's Momentus XT notebook drive. This little speed demon combines both 4GB of solid state storage along with 500GB of traditional rotational media into the industry's first "hybrid" SSD-infused hard drive. It offered great performance, especially after the drive's caching algorithms optimized data usage models but its cost was also about 2X of traditional notebook hard drives of similar capacities. So, as usual, there were trade-offs.

Recently, WD took the time to send us in their fastest 7200 RPM 500GB notebook drive. I decided to take the opportunity to do a quick little A/B comparison in performance, over in the HotHardware Blog section. The new WD Scorpio Black 500GB 2.5-inch notebook hard drive weighs in at half the price ($76 at Amazon) of the Momentus XT, and as you'll see, does a fairly good job of hanging with it, from a performance standpoint as well.