The XT concept was first tried out by Seagate three years ago as a way of combining fast but expensive flash memory with a slower but cheaper spinning hard disk. The launch was not a success, partly because the small amount of flash and the lack of support for operating systems beyond Windows Vista.

Last May, Seagate , the XT, featuring 4GB of onboard flash and sales started to climb off the floor. The point of the drive is to improve boot times and overall application performance compared to a conventional disk-only drive.