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Level 1

8 points

ST750LX003-1AC154 seagate momentus reduce my battery life

Hi guys,

I have a macbook white 2,4 Ghz with 8Ghz.

I used to have OSX mountain Lion installed on Western digital Scorpio blue 640 Gb but recently i bought the Seagate ST750LX003-1AC154 XT momentus hybride.

I did fresh install everything is working well execpt for the battery life of my macbook.

Before full charge capacity i got 6h time surfing internet, email, etc.. lite duty

NOW if i can reach 2h or 2,5h i am very happy!!!

So is it something normal to drain the battery life time so quickly?

I understand that performance are higher and i confirm that it is working well but it is dividing the battery life time by 3???

Do you have any recomendations, feed back?

Thanks a lot

Chris

MacBook, OS X Mountain Lion, white and working perfectly!

Posted on Aug 21, 2012 8:15 PM

33 replies

Christoph38 Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 27, 2012 6:52 PM in response to FishNYC22

Hi!,

Yes i think the drive is always spining. The temperature is very hot!

Cheers,

Chris

Christoph38 Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 27, 2012 6:58 PM in response to FishNYC22

Dave,

I contacted Seagate on Facbook and on their website.

I got some stupid answer telling that it was normal that the baterry was darined out faster because i am using 7200 rpm instead of 5200 rpm HDD.

Wow very smart answer when they publish on their web site specifications and claiming that it does not consume more power than other HDD, and even it would sapre the battery span.

So honestly i am bit upset with Seagate... They ignore my problem or just trying to buy time by turning in round!

Do you know if i can update the firmware? as propsed by Mac.Herectic?

If somebody can help?

Chris

FishNYC22

Level 2

390 points

Aug 27, 2012 7:04 PM in response to Christoph38

Lets see what they say to me since my old drive was 7200rpm also. This is absolutely not normal behaviour. I wouldn't run that firmware on the different drive unless seagate says you can.

Aug 27, 2012 10:28 PM in response to Christoph38

Yea Seagate's site is confusing on that firmware update. If you search for the firmware for your drive or click the link on your drive's specification page it takes you to the link I provided earlier. I don't know if this means that the firmware is good for that drive or if it's a mistake on their site.

FishNYC22

Level 2

390 points

Aug 28, 2012 2:14 PM in response to Christoph38

Seagates response was pretty much useless. They actually quoted this thread as a solution because I included it in my initial email to them.

Their full response was the following..... so now what? Ugh!

Thank you for contacting Seagate Technical Support.

I am sorry you are having a problem with your Seagate Momentus XT drive. Let me help you resolve this issue. I understand you cloned your old drive to your new Seagate drive and now your battery life is drained quickly. Did you adjust the power settings on your laptop? After doing research there is not a firmware update available for this drive. Did you try the troubleshooting steps in the link you provided? They listed below.

There are two suspects to this cause:

A "runaway" background process - this is when an application or process of an application continues to use CPU power & therefore battery power after it's supposed to terminate.

At this time Apple is reportedly looking into what is causing this issue. There have been users that have reported that with no runaway processes there is still a significant reduction in battery life.

To look into this I'd say take a peek at your CPU processes using Activity Monitor. Here's some info on that here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5146

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5147

The next is to turn off the Power Nap feature under System Preferences. Here's a support article for adjusting Power Nap settings:

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11465

If you have any additional questions you may reply back to this email or call us at 800-732-4283 Monday through Friday 8am - 11:30am CST; 1pm - 6pm (CST). For your convenience we also have online chat assistance.

Christoph38 Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 29, 2012 6:58 PM in response to FishNYC22

To make a long story short!

1- Thanks to all who tried to help me!

2- After trouble shooting, checking everything, updating, etc.... Nothing change and i have still problem of battery life drained out when i am using this Seagate.

3- i put a travelstar 750 GB 7200 rpm which is very fast but not as fast as the Seagate and give me still 6h battery life time. SO SEAGATE IS WRONG WRONG WRONG about the speed of HDD

4- I contacted SEAGATE to check how i can work out a solution with them... and they don't have solution, they don't offer anything as compensation....

Nevertheless, the offer me to replace my XT momentus costing 220 SGD by a Standard 750 GB HD at around 100 SGD.

Well they call it a fair offer!

Conclusion.

a- SEAGATE sell **** PRODUCT,

b- SEAGATE has not any concern for their customers facing problems

c- --> a + b = SEAGATE CUSTOMER SUPPORT is ONLY BLABLABLA.

My Advice:

I should have been more careful about information and review posted on internet regarding Seagate.

The XT momentus is a good HDD for desktop but it is not SUITABLE for a Laptop if you are concerned by the battery life time.

I recomend the western digital blue or the latest Hitachi travelstar 7200 rpm. I noticed with this one a lower battery life time but little but not deviding it by 3 time.

western digital scorpio blue --> 6h20min at full charge

Travelstar Hitachi --> 6h00min at full charge

Thanks to all.

Best regards

Chris

FishNYC22

Level 2

390 points

Aug 29, 2012 7:04 PM in response to Christoph38

Seagate has ask me to call one of their support specialists to see if they can find whats going on. I can't do that till maybe Tues or Wed next week but will let you know what happens.

The retailer I bought the drive from has offered to replace it with another one (or optionally, I can return it) to see if that solves the problem. I may let seagate try to resolve it first just to save the 6-7 hrs of cloning that it takes to get my data moved to the different drives.

Fun stuff 🙂

Sep 27, 2012 3:02 AM in response to FishNYC22

How did you get on? I'm having a similar drastic reduction in battery life after installing this drive.

Christoph38 Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 27, 2012 5:47 AM in response to smacdonald

Hi ,

I replace the h drive by my Scorpio blue.

I bought recently ssd 512 from crucial, which was giving me also similar battery issue.

Full charge was giving me only 4h.

I updated lion from 10.8.1 to 10.8.2 and now I have 8 to 9h.

I read that lion got issue of power management with 10.8.1 so it seems that update solved the problem.

I am wondering if now using seagate could improve the batterie life?

I will install back on seagate just to compare but definitively I will keep my ssd after.

Regards

FishNYC22

Level 2

390 points

Sep 27, 2012 5:51 AM in response to smacdonald

I never got to follow up with seagate about this. I've just been dealing with it. I get about 2.5 hrs under heavy use which for a mid 2010 I believe isn't horrible. Its less than I was getting before. thats for sure. But its definitely faster. I just don't have the time right now to deal with this. Life and work is running me in circles.

Sep 27, 2012 6:00 AM in response to Christoph38

That's good info Christoph!

I use a SSD in my MacBook as well & much prefer it because of the increased speed.

Nov 22, 2012 3:56 PM in response to mac.heretic

any updates on this issue, i was about to buy it, but decided to do some reseach because i read that there was a problem with some seagate drive and the g force protection conflicting with the mbp sudden motion sensor, but discovered this thread and now im not so sure. what would be a good alternative to this drive, in terms of speed and if possible the hybrid option and obviously the 32mb cache and 7200 rpms

Feb 1, 2013 9:02 AM in response to psiconauta0

Do any of you experience that the drive is having problems with the journaling? I am seeing this type of messages popping up in the console:

Re: jnl: unknown-dev: flushing fs disk buffer returned 0x5

This has severe impact on performance, it freezes constantly, and perhaps also is causing battery drainage.

I am doing troubleshooting and it seems performance inproves after removing bootcamp partition. Do you have bootcamp partition?

Víctor

Feb 4, 2013 1:54 PM in response to Neneonline

Just in case anyone is interested, Seagate has confirmed there are compatibility problems with the Seagate Momentos XT 750GB and Mac OS.

Feb 4, 2013 2:15 PM in response to FishNYC22

That's good to know! Have you got a link to the article? I'd like to read it.

ST750LX003-1AC154 seagate momentus reduce my battery life