Seagate Momentus XT

Unfortunately the firmware update doesn't fix the problem - I've been wrestling with this issue all day on a pair of these drives. I don't trust them whatsoever, and unfortunately this is just the latest in a bad run for me with Seagate.

Shame - they're good performers when they're not automatically spun down every few minutes!

How long does it take to install Snow Leopard? I've ran the installer but it always seems to hang around 27 minutes remaining.

Much appreciated thanks!

I have to agree with Frankoblanko, it vibrates much more than the old one or a 7,200 RPM Hitachi 500 GB drive does... Also, I noticed that sleep doesn't always work as scheduled - I have walked away a few times for a long conversation and come back to a machine that is dead (sleep set to the default of 10 minutes after inactivity).

I installed 10.6 yesterday on the XT in my Macbook Late 2008. The actual installation was about 15 minutes, perhaps less, and then it took a few minutes to fill in the few setup windows. To update to 10.6.4 afterwards of course took a bit longer with the downloading etc.

Hope it helps.
/p

Frankoblanko wrote:
- It's vibrating! Unfortunately if you put it on certain surfaces like my cheap wooden table, the quickly spinning drive seems to make my MacbookPro (i5) and the table swing. That produces a humming noise, which is quite annoying. If I lift it up, it's quiet though and i just feel the vibrations. Maybe I have to experiment with a shock absorbing layer ...

Has anyone tried to insulate the drive somehow? I experience the same (very slight) vibrations on certain surfaces (like wood). When I installed the drive I thought about putting a thin layer of foam or even felt in the drive compartment - or around the four pins that hold it in place - but I wasn't sure if that's a good idea in view of ventilation etc.

Thoughts?

/p

I am having PROBLEMS with my seagate momentus xt.. It worked so well for about a month, and one day, all my videos started hanging.. Browser scrolling started hanging and pausing on me too... I am so disappointed, I was really enjoying the super sonic speed from the original 5400 hitachi.. Guess I have to send it in for warranty..
I cloned the seagate back to the hitachi, and so far, watched several videos for testing and no hangs yet...
One funny thing... When I did the option commandshift and power button combo, that seemed to help for about 30 mins, and then back to the dumps.. I couldn't take all the hangs anymore.. So I thought I would search, and looks like we have a mystery about this out here....

The problem you're having is that these Momentus XTs have a problem with their automatic power management which causes them to spin down constantly, presumably to save power. There's a firmware update that's supposed to fix it, and it helped somewhat - but every one of them I've tested still tries to spin itself down occasionally. This is regardless of your energy saver prefs, and I've also tried HDAPM scripts, etc. and nothing helps. It's ridiculous.

Your best bet is a Hitachi Travelstar. I swapped my XTs for those and the overall performance is pretty much the same other than bootup time, but I can live with that minor difference in favor of dependability.

For more info, go check out Seagate's support forum - this is well documented (and complained about).

Cheers,

Great, looks like I will dumping this drive with a multitude of others at the same time.. It worked great for about a month.. Thats why I didn't think spin down was my issue at first, but I have no idea how to determine if my drive is spinning down or not. But I have seen this problem other places on the net, as well as other mac owners selling the drive as almost new.. Oh well, sounds like you really have this figured out.. Thanks for the recommendation.. Saves me from a lot of research time, which is why im in this mess to begin with.. Originally I had a WD 640 GB drive started acting almost the same but not quite as bad. Sent the macbook pro in for warranty repair and they said the hard drive was failing, quoted me 995.00 to change it out.. Then I got the seagate.. Now all the way back to the original, and so far after two days, I dont see any problems.. Here is a video where the hangs we caught.. I was doing a screen record, so I didn't think the hard drive would spin down, but I guess it did... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibtuRXWBvBQ Only in the first couple of mins are where most of the hangs are caught, maybe the hard drive spun up after all that.. I just don't get it.. I guess I will send in the seagate for warranty just to help send them a message... Thanks!

hi there i was thinking to buy myself the Seagate XT there is a noticable difference with the Hitachi 250 i have mounted on my macbook black?
or better to go with this hitachi and a external firewire hard disk?
I use Logic and sometime i got a msg hard disk "running too slow"

Do not under any circumstance purchase the momentus xt for your macbook pro. It will NOT work, no matter what the apple and seagate employees tell you.
The drive is incompatible with the macbook pro as far as I have seen on the seagate support boards.
Don't believe any of the pundits saying this is a good drive, I went through two of them, and none would work with the macbook pro (2010) model.
It starts out installing, but then slows down to nothing, and eventually just stops with no error notification or anything. Many others have had this problem also, and it's widespread.
Also, I have heard that seagate is selling many drives with known problems and not saying anything. Just wait until this problem at seagate gets fixed, maybe the next version.
Until then, don't buy this piece of crap.

Hi, sorry if this a bit off-topic, but I'm thinking about getting this drive, would it be better to do a clean install of Snow Leopard, then restore from Time Machine, or just clone the old HD? Thanks.

I recommend not to buy any Seagate Momentus drive since they are the ones found on the '06 '07 model macbooks that fail because of a faulty part.

ganster wrote:
Do not under any circumstance purchase the momentus xt for your macbook pro. It will NOT work, no matter what the apple and seagate employees tell you.
The drive is incompatible with the macbook pro as far as I have seen on the seagate support boards.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

I am typing this on a c.2009 Macbook Pro (2.53 c2d, 4gb, 9400+9600 512mb, SL 10.6.4) and I have had no problems installing or running a Momentus XT 500GB drive. So it's simply untrue that the Momentus XT is fundamentally incompatible with Macbook Pros. Maybe it's incompatible with new MBP's, but it's not incompatible with ALL MBP's.

When I bought this MBP, 16 months ago, it came with a 5400rpm 320GB drive. I had a 7200rpm Western Digital Black 320 lying around from a previous Windows notebook, and so I almost immediately replaced that OEM. The WD Black was a great upgrade, performance-wise, but it did produce more heat and was louder than the OEM drive. Battery life wasn't affected.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time to bump up my storage a bit and decided to give the Momentus XT a shot. Out of the box it is running firmware SD23.

So far, it's great. I haven't been completely "blown away" by the upgrade, but it does feel that things are "snappier" than they were before. Though I'm coming from that WD Black drive, which is regarded as one of the best notebook drives on the market. After 3-4 reboots, I did notice that it seems to boot faster than ever, though I hardly ever reboot my Mac anyway, so it's somewhat of a moot point. General app performance (Aperture, iTunes, iLife, iWork, etc) is superb, with everything seeming just a touch zippier than before. It's not dramatically faster, but I do think it's better. Could be from the fresh install of Snow Leopard, but it could be the drive. XBench does confirm that the drive is, overall, an improvement over the WD.

The XT is definitely quieter than the WD. No noise or vibration at all. As quiet as the OEM 5400. The XT also seems to put out slightly less heat than the WD, but that's hardly scientific. Battery life is a wash. It's no better or worse than it was with the WD.

Now, I do realize that there are people who report that the XT is "great" for a month or two and then performance degrades. Time will tell. If it happens to me I'll report back on it.

In previous installs (and re-installs) I've used SuperDuper to clone my HD to the new drive using a FireWire800 enclosure. I've never had any problems with that method; very easy to do. But this time, I decided to do a fresh install of SL on the new drive, then use the Migration Assistant to handle my stuff. It worked flawlessly. Installed the new XT in the MBP, put my WD drive in a FW800 enclosure, booted with the SL CD, "erased" the new drive, let SL install (30 minutes), then let the Migration Assistant copy all of my documents & apps from the WD to the XT. That process took about 90 minutes (200GB of data). Then I had about 1.5GB of updates to download (back to 10.6.4). After that, done. All documents, music, photos, apps, settings, etc where exactly as I left them. Cloned perfectly, as far as I can tell. Even my WindowsXP VM's & data via Parallels. The only "problem" (and I knew it would happen from past experience) is that TimeMachine sees that my whole system has changed and needed to do a full, multi-hour backup again rather than just an incremental. NBD.

Here's a stats comparison using XBench.

Western Digital Black 320GB 7200RPM

Disk Test 37.25
Sequential 61.67
Uncached Write 91.37 56.10 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 63.40 35.87 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 40.36 11.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.78 37.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.68
Uncached Write 8.67 0.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 75.43 24.15 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 69.15 0.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 146.38 27.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Seagate Momentus XT 500GB 7200RPM
Disk Test 41.64
Sequential 115.23
Uncached Write 88.12 54.10 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 165.75 93.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 84.06 24.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 184.02 92.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 25.41
Uncached Write 7.13 0.76 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 283.71 90.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 124.97 0.89 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 176.98 32.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Numbers don't lie. It's a good drive and I think this type of hybrid drive is the future of storage, especially in notebooks. 4GB of flash is a good start, and hopefully within a year or so we'll see more hybrid drives with much larger SSD components.

I have mine for ca. a month now. I'm upgrading from an already upgraded 5400 500 GB drive. Performance is up noticeably and from that alone I would recommend the drive.

Alas I had some freezes. The first week was without problems, second week there were up to 4 freezes on one day and now it is one or two freezes a week. I will probably keep it.

Hardware is a 5.1 MB with 10.6.4 and the sd23 disk firmware.

Riiight so i looked around before buying this drive and i couldn't find so many complaints as i have found in the last 4 hours hehe.

I bought this drive today (don't know what firmware) used Carbon Copy Cloner (which is awesome by the way) and put the drive in, it worked find then did the locking up and freezing thing over and over and over again, with most of my windows fanboy mates laughing at me over gtalk on one of my other laptops i went to work downgrading the firmware to 1.6.

The drive appears to be working absolutely fine now, in fact it seems a whole lot faster than the factory 5400 320gb drive that came with the macbookpro, out of morbid curiosity i clicked everything in my doc to see how long it would take, this includes xcode, adobe cs5 (all of it) microsoft office and a few others the programs all started quite a bit quicker than they would have on the old drive and the computer did not hang at all, quite impressive!

So it appears that this drive is fine with the MBP when it is using the sata controller in 1.5 mode rather than 3.0gb mode.

The xbench app tells me that since the downgrade of the firmware the computer rates a bit lower on all counts which is a shame, the speeds were awesome before then when it wasn't locking up.

Final verdict is yet to be seen but i think this could be a viable drive, its a shame that the sata controller from apple doesnt like to work with the seagate xt drive in full speed mode.