I want to upgrade the HDD in my macbook. Has anybody tried the new seagate momentus XT?
Has anybody had experience with standard 7200 rpm seagate momentus HDD?
I am particularly worried by possible decrease in battery life or increases in vibration or noise.
Thanks.
I Purchased the ST95005620AS Momentus XT as an upgrade hoping for a snappier computing experience. I'm very disappointed to find that video playback is greatly affected. I have tried using hdapm to limit apm and it had no effect. After setting the drive to max the pauses in playback continued. I just popped the drive out and slapped a jumper on to limit the speed to 1.5 and it's much improved - but there's still an occasional pause. I wonder where people get those tiny jumpers when they don't have IT jobs? Lucky for me I had one 😉
I work in advertising and video playback is crucial - I'd think for most people that smooth video playback is something that we take for granted these days.
I'm going to remove the drive this evening and put back my 7200rpm Hitachi.
My advice - skip buying this drive - snappier load times are not worth giving up smooth playback of video for.
Just a follow up - this morning I tried to run through a keynote that played well on my previous Hitachi drive. The presentation has several embedded video assets ranging from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes, all of which pause several times during playback.
Conclusion - the jumper setting does not solve the pausing issues with the Momentus XT and macbook pro i5 series notebooks.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'm very happy with the upgrade so far. Not sure why others are having so many problems.
No video issues at all on my Macbook Pro with the XT. As smooth as it's always been, which is to say, perfect. I watched an hour-long HD (720p MKV) video last night, no playback issues whatsoever.
I checked the System Profile, and the SATA controller is at full 3.0 GB speed. No lockups, no hiccups, no beachballs, no drive clicking, no vibration. Just superb and quiet performance. I wish everyone were having the same experience.
Now again, my MBP is the previous generation mid-2009 model with the Core2Duo 2.53. Perhaps there is some sort of controller incompatibility with the XT and the new 2010 i3/i5 MBP's?
Mister Koz & Simon Falcon, what firmware is your XT running? There have been a few revisions from Seagate. Mine came from Seagate (via Amazon) with the latest, which is as of this writing, SD23.
I've seen many complaints and compliments for the Seagate Momentous XT Drive. I went to Seagate and watch their comparison with 3 other drives and I became interested. From what I read, I was impressed enough to give it a try.
I installed this drive overnight with OS X Disk Utility. I placed my old drive WD 5400 500GB into an external case, installed the new Seagate drive and used the Disk Utility to image the new drive with my previous image. I did set the Disk Utility to erase before imaging. I've learned the hard way it's better to start with all 0's.
I've used this drive for several hours now with now issues. Boot up was fine; same boot time as the previous drive: 1:47. I ran a few of my often used programs and apps (Safari, Mail, Rapidweaver, BusyCal, Pages, etc) Then I rebooted 4 times (as I've read on many forums) to see the Learning Technology do it's work. My results:
I'm not an advanced user who is going to run several test. I'm speaking from the point of view as an educated professional who needs performance, comfort and reliability. So here's what I'm seeing.
Pros: The boot time is Amazing! The boot time makes it worth the cost of the drive (approximately $139). The applications (Commonly used) are FAST to load, process and close. I can't calculate this saving; but I do feel it. I guess you can make the analogy of driving a sedan or a sports car; they both get you to were you're going, but the speed is very nice to have when taking off.
Cons: The only con I've experienced thus far is the vibration. I do notice a difference over the WD 5400. Many tell me this is common for 7200's and it's why most laptop manufactures don't use them. I've read some post saying the vibration is annoying. I'm not sure I agree with that statement. Since I can't show it, I'll compare it. The vibration feels much like a fan motor. It's a small fraction of the vibration you feel when using your optical drive (cd/DVD); about a 1/8 the vibration. I can't say it's annoying, but I could see of some would say it gets annoying after hours of use. It's really a trade off for the speed and performance. Again, you buy a performance motor, you're bound to feel some vibration. I use a laptop cooler under my MBP. I find this cooler gives off more than 3x the vibration than the seagate XT.
I'm a frequent user. One factor that influences my decision to purchase RAM, HD's, and software is cost vs. time. Seeing these numbers and knowing I prefer to carry my machine in a powered down state, I will save at least 365+ minutes of boot time a year. That's 6+ hours a year saved in boot time alone! Not to mention, my frequently used programs are much faster and snappier. I can't begin to calculate the cost savings of that part. Multiply your hourly wage time 6; if it exceeds the cost difference over the not XT, then you'll save big! Although there are a couple draw backs (cost & vibration), +I think the cost is more than worth the cost and the time savings makes it feel like a steal.+
You only see one drive, there's no flash or hdd volume. The flash is used for cashing reads and it's completely managed by the harddrive firmware, you have no control over it.
Problem still exits under 10.6.5. Jumpering the drive down to 1.5 Gb/s didn't helped either. But manipulating the power management using hdapm looks promising so far.
I've had this drive for about a month now, (after my 7200rpm plain 500gb momentus broke down and pied half of my data), and have just started to see some issues. Like some others have mentioned it seems to have trouble with video playback, especially streaming for some reason. The UI has also started to become slightly sluggish.
It hasn't affected my battery life too much, but I'm getting a bit annoyed. I'll keep backing up and let the drive run for another month before I switch back to another drive.
Also on a note regarding the vibrations: The screws have some form of lock-tite on them, and simply leave them standing about .5mm from fully inserted, pushing against the rubber ‘shims’ will get rid of vibrations.
These are Xbench marks on the momentus xt drive. (perhaps the video issue has something to do with the incredibly low Uncached Write [4K] score?)
Disk Test 42.65
Sequential 110.15
Uncached Write 91.94 56.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 157.94 89.36 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 74.42 21.78 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 176.40 88.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 26.45
Uncached Write 7.47 0.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 260.94 83.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 137.27 0.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 161.52 29.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]
mmm so far i'm having a blast.. ok so it's been a day.. i'm hoping load/boot times improve.
how would i go about timing boot times though.. i'm waiting till i see my adium connect cos i don't see how else I can quantify it. Don't know what I should be looking out for...
Installed it [ST95005620AS] in my MacBook Pro Unibody late 2008 with zero complaints. It feels like a new machine: all is much faster, except the booting time, which might be another issue. Few months later I added more RAM for a total of 4GB and feel no difference in speed. Momentus XT though brought a considerable improvement in overall speed.
(1) It's from begin of the ding sound till the login screen.
(2) Test with a clean install.
(3) If that doesn't do it, give up the few seconds - not really worth it ...
... if you don't there's
optional (4) google, reset, reset, clean, google, etc... till you're mad and one day.. 😉
+(1) It's from begin of the ding sound till the login screen.+
Between the startup sound and the login screen many hardware related things happen, so this process does not scale linear with you hard drive speed.
But if you have many startup items (DropBox, Textexpander, iStatMenu, Hazel, Quicksilver …) in your user account which are loaded after you login you should see a considerable speed boost. My boot time went down from ca. 1:40 (startup sound till all startup items are loaded) down to ca. 45 sec with 90% of that improvement in the post login.
