Seagate is now shipping the second generation of Momentus XT, its solid state hybrid drive for consumer and commercial laptops and the company's fastest drive ever for personal computers.

The drive is now available at online retailers Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect. Seagate said that seven original equipment manufacturers would ship laptops powered by the Momentus XT drive.

Powering the Momentus XT drive are Seagate?s Adaptive Memory and FAST Factor technologies. Adaptive Memory technology works by identifying data usage patterns, and then moving the most frequently retrieved information to solid state memory for faster access. Adaptive Memory tailors hard drive performance to each user and the applications they use. FAST Factor technology blends the strengths of SSDs and hard disk drives for faster access to applications, quicker bootup and higher overall system speed.

The Momentus XT drive is nearly 70 percent faster than the prior Momentus drive version and up to three times faster than a traditional hard disk drive while providing 750GB of storage capacity. The hard drive?s Serial ATA 6Gb/second interface and 8 gigabytes of Single Level Cell NAND flash double the interface and NAND read-write speed of the previous generation. The all-in-one design of Momentus XT drive makes installation and upgrading simple and easy for any laptop or desktop computer and with any operating system.

The hard drive industry is transitioning from the current 512-byte sector standard to a newer Advanced Format 4K (4096-byte) sector size that helps maintain data integrity at higher storage densities and capacities. Momentus XT takes advantage of this newer Advanced Format 4K standard and is already tuned for optimal performance on the latest PC operating systems. This does not mean that the new drive cannot operate under Windows XP. Users can easily optimize Momentus XT to work with Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft Windows with a few simple steps. Visit this page on the Seagate web site to determine if Momentus XT is already tuned for your operating system version and how to do so if needed: http://www.seagate.com/momentusXT-4K.

The Momentus XT drive is now shipping in volume worldwide. Manufacturer?s Suggesting Retail Pricing (MSRP) for Momentus XT 750GB is $245.