Seagate Momentus XT Disaster

Return the drive and get a replacement, it really is an excellent drive, and known to work (well, by eww and me at least 🙂

That s****s! but why not use it as an external and clear as much that drive as possible by moving it to the XT?

PS: where on Earth are you that has a policy forbidding return of defective items that anyone actually takes seriously? Call your credit card company and put it into dispute, that'll get your money back.

I have had major problems with the XT Momentus 500gb drive also. I purchased it in December and it worked fine until about the end of February. At that time I saw instability problems start to appear. I did not know they were attributable to the drive right away, but it became apparent during long file transfers that the drive was the source of the problems. Instability issues became worse and worse. Some of the symptoms I see are:

System Freeze up during large file transfers such as those from a Tivo over the network.

System instability and crash during simple finder copies of multi GB files. The 'force quit' application, and 'Activity monitor' start to show applications move to "not responding" status one by one. If you click on a menu item of an open application at this phase, the menu item highlights black and then the application becomes unresponsive and freezes.

Once the drive is in this state it is unuseable as these symptoms return again and again.

Things I have tried:

Disk Utility Repair - no problems found

Disk Warrior - no major probleems found.

Installed a fresh system with no 3rd party software. No improvement

Cloned a known, good, working system to the drive. No improvement

Ran Seatools against the drive on a Windows box - All tests passed

I replaced the drive with my Deskstar for a while and just recently revisted the issue. I found the idea here about running the drive externally to see if it would work fine as a troubleshooting measure. What I found is that for the past 3 days, running the Momentus as an external drive, with the cloned data from the Desktar, and as the boot drive, the Momentus is completely stable. I had forgotten how fast this thing is. It is wicked fast, and fast even though it is running from the USB port. I am hesitant to put the drive back into the MacBook Pro. The only differences that I can see when running the drive externally is it does not have to use the Macbook's internal power supply. Being a 7200rpm drive it would demand more power from the internals. The other issue being thermal. The drive runs hotter than a 5400 rpm drive. What's puzzling about that is that the drive is reported to be working in MacBook Pro's for a number of people.

Since Seatools tests all pass, Seagate considers the drive to be working correctly and will not issue an error

code for return. It seems I am in limbo here. I'll install the drive internally in the next couple of days and report back with my findings.

Equipment: Macbook Pro 2.53ghz Mid 2009

This unit barely moves off of my desk, especially during the entire fall, winter time frame.

What is the revision number of the Seagate firmware? it should be SD28

I failed to mention that I had upgraded the firmware to SD28. I did extensive reviewing of the product before purchase and discovered that a number of people were reporting issues with the drive running previous versions of the firmware, so I updated to SD28 when I received the shipment.

I have no explanation, I have several XT500 and XT750, all running internally and all running correctly. Sorry.

Is any of your equipment older than 2010, and/or do you have a mid 2009 MacBook Pro running one of these internally?

1 2008 15" MBP, 2 Late 2009 13" and 1 2011 15", plus 2 2011 Mini's, I also put a 500 in a clients 2007 15"

Its a puzzler for sure.

Just wanted to chime in,

I have a early 2008 MBP (the last non unibody with a 2.5 Ghz Core 2 Duo). I had one 500 Gb momentus xt fail and I thought the second one had failed when it was actually part of my mother board that was going (according to the apple tech) Apple replaced the motherboard free of charge because of some known graphics issues, but I also returned the 500 Gb momentus for the 750 momentus and so far that has worked pretty well. Overall performance is vastly improved, even over sata 1.5 Gbps. I think most macs after mine are sata 3 Gbps or even 6 Gbps so performance could be even better for you guys. I have noticed that occasionally my computer will not shut down correctly and get humg up on the white screen. Other than that the drive has been great. I think Seagate put out some really bad firmware at first that has since been cleaned up through updates, I hae read a fair amount of horror stories. I do think that there is no better drive to have if you want lots of storage and still want the super drive too.

It is baffling, I agree. I've had a 500GB early XT in my late-2008 unibody MBP for about a year and a half now. It has always been perfectly stable and dependable in twelve-hour-a-day use. I've had two complaints about it:

1. It's not dramatically faster than the 250GB 5400RPM conventional drive it replaced. I wonder whether it's really any faster than a conventional 500GB 7200RPM drive would be. I wouldn't encourage anyone to pay the hybrid premium for speed alone. In my experience, it isn't justified.

2. Until firmware SD28 came out for it, it was running up load cycles at a frightening pace. It's rated for 600,000, and during much of its first year it accumulated them at a rate of about 2000 a day. Each firmware revision (I think I started out at SD24) slowed the cycling down only a little, and after just two months I wrote to Seagate complaining that it looked like my drive would exceed its expected cycle-count lifespan in only ten or eleven months. They offered to replace it, but I told them that as long as mine continued to function perfectly well in all other respects, I'd rather wait a while for them to develop an improved model than get an identical replacement, which was all they could offer then. When SD28 came out, the cycling slowed way down. The drive still isn't impressively fast, and I wouldn't spend $20-$30 more for it than for a conventional 7200RPM drive, at least not for use in this computer. But the rapid load cycling problem is solved now.

Matt- I'm glad to hear it worked out for you. I have AppleCare on the unit. Still, I have to wonder why my Hitachi Deskstar 500 works absolutely fine internally where the Momentus does not.

mattthemountainman wrote:

Just wanted to chime in,

I have a early 2008 MBP (the last non unibody with a 2.5 Ghz Core 2 Duo). I had one 500 Gb momentus xt fail and I thought the second one had failed when it was actually part of my mother board that was going (according to the apple tech) Apple replaced the motherboard free of charge because of some known graphics issues, but I also returned the 500 Gb momentus for the 750 momentus and so far that has worked pretty well. Overall performance is vastly improved, even over sata 1.5 Gbps. I think most macs after mine are sata 3 Gbps or even 6 Gbps so performance could be even better for you guys. I have noticed that occasionally my computer will not shut down correctly and get humg up on the white screen. Other than that the drive has been great. I think Seagate put out some really bad firmware at first that has since been cleaned up through updates, I hae read a fair amount of horror stories. I do think that there is no better drive to have if you want lots of storage and still want the super drive too.

I agree with youu that the 750 is significantly faster than the 500.

Here's a link to video comparing the XT with an SSD and the original drive fitted to a 15" MBP