For 2nd drive, Momentus XT or Scorpio Blue?

Hi there.

Like many of you, I have an SSD for the OS. However, I'm not sure what to buy for D:\

Momentus XT 500GB or Scorpio Blue 750GB?

Sequential read/write speeds not important at all.

Instead, I would like:
1. quick access after drive sleep; or
2. drive never sleeps, but low power consumption.

Noise and vibration are also very important.

I've read everything I can find on the subject, but many conflicting accounts. Does firmware 24 address the issues on the Momentus for just these issues. Does the Scorpio take long to access from sleep? Or Can i just set the Scorpio to never sleep, but not have battery issues? Can someone weigh in on these issues specifically?

 

I have hte XT for my 2nd drive, had a 7K500 before that. I prefer the XT as I use it for my user folders and the NAND works well for that. I don't notice with SD24 any real pause issues but YMMV.

As far as battery I can't say. I use it as a DTR plugged in. Any time you keep platters up and running without spinning down though it is just bound to effect battery life. Maybe others can help you better with that question.

 

cool. comments on noise? please say whether quietness is important to you, because it's paramount to me.

 

I had both drives, and IMO there was no difference in noise/vibrations. I also own the Scorpio Blue 320, 640 GB as well and they are all equally as quiet as the 500 GB.

 

I use the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB (WD5000BEVT) as my second drive along with my Intel X25-M SSD and have no problems with the drive. It's fairly quiet and don't notice any major vibrations when slotted in my optical drive bay. It runs quite cool too, 36 Celsius while in use playing back my soundtrack via iTunes.

I don't notice problems starting up from sleep, usually when my 4 year old worn battery runs low after 1.30hrs which forces my system to sleep I simply re-plug it back in again and the drive responds back into session well without lag. I can't specifically say about the benefits of battery life since I don't have a decent battery cell to test this thoroughly!

Given the price and storage space on offer it is a decent drive and would recommend.

 

Scorpio Black 750gb is now shipping, while a bit more expensive nice drive IMHO.

 

Momentus XT! No questions asked! That thing is fast enough to keep up with your SSD when transfering stuff from one drive to the other. I have it as my secondary drive and have never regretted it!

 

If speed is irrelevant, get the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB. It has been shown to have lower vibration, noise, and heat than other drives out there (especially vs 7200rpm drives).

The only benefit of the Seagate Momentus XT is that it offers better performance than a 7200rpm hard drive. But since you're using an SSD, performance is irrelevant. All you're doing with this drive is inexpensive bulk storage. So you might as well get the cheapest, quietest, coolest bulk storage you can get, and buy a Western Digital Scorpio Blue.

 

I would recommend a 1TB WD 5200 RPM HDD. I have used the Momentus XT before with no problems, no noise and no vibrations but I have gone for more storage space this time. Since you have an SSD for your primary drive, speed is less of an issue.

 

1TB drives are just so much space, and without an effective backup solution, its a LOT of data that can go missing if the drive dies!

 

Uhh isn't the 1 TB Scorpio Blue 12.5mm...won't fit in most optical drive caddies or laptops for that matter.

 

I ordered 2x 1TB drives for the default config in my new NP8170 laptop and those became available only a few days ago on Kobalt UK's site. Since they are available for the NP8150 and installed in the standard HDD space, they must be the correct size.

My backup solution are 1Tb and 2Tb external USB 2.0 HDD's along with Drive Snapshot that does compressed backups at the speed of around 1GB per minute. With USB 3.0 available, this might be even quicker. I backup onto multiple drives too.

 

Newegg has the 1 TB drives listed as 12.5mm.

The NP8170/NP8150 aren't exactly the best example of a normal notebook by the way..

 

Okay.. issues addressed:

1. 1TB is a lot of data to lose. Yes, that's why I use Backblaze for online backups. Unlimited backups, $5 a month.

2. I have a MacBook Pro 13". 12.5mm drives do not fit in the optibay drive caddy. Therefore, a TWO drive system like mine would have to move the SSD into the optibay caddy and the HDD into the normal drive slot. GREAT! Only problem is that the optibay doesn't do SATA 6gbps. Oh, not so great.

3. When I say I don't care about speed, I said I don't care about sequential read/write. I want either fast wake or low voltage idle. Let me clarify:

The SSD OS drive will always be on. My iTunes data will be on the slow, big data drive (second drive). The second drive has a tendency to go to sleep when not in use. So if I bring up iTunes, I want to access the files immediately. Does that make sense?

Yes, I want speed. I want to be able to access files quickly after a long down time. However, I don't care about large file transfers. Once the data is on there, it won't move often.

This is why I'm having trouble deciding between Scorpio blue and Momentus XT. I have a feeling the XT will be much faster with iTunes. Even though all signs point to Scorpio blue for size, price, low noise, reliability, battery life.

 

From personally owning a Momentus XT drive, I can tell you I was sourly disappointed with it. It costed twice as much as a normal 7200 rpm drive and was no faster IMO than a standard drive yet you pay twice the amount for the 4 GB SLC flash NAND.

 

I don't know what you mean by fast and whether or not it pertains to my specific issue.

I care nothing for sequential speeds.
I care a lot about random reads.

Price is not an issue. Scorpio blue 750GB is $90. Momentus XT is $100.

Can someone answer the question relevant to my own needs?
I'm not asking which drive is "better."

 

If all you're doing is listening to media, get the Scorpio Blue.

An MP3 will play equivalently well, regardless of whether you have it on a 5400rpm, 7200rpm, hybrid, or SSD drive.

 

I don't think I'm explaining myself well. I'm not a hardware noob just because I have 2 MacBooks in my sig. I also wrote the VAIO TZ guide.

The problem is wake time on the 2nd drive. Once a drive is "awake," then yes, all drives then become the same to me. The problem is if the drive is asleep. If a drive is asleep, I have to "wait" for it to wake up. This is a problem with iTunes. If I hit the iTunes button, it will search my D:\ drive. If the drive was sleeping, I have to wait.

This is why I asked for low idle power, or fast wake from sleep.

Another reason unrelated to this for getting the Momentus XT might be for album covers. I browse my library using Album thumbnails (not coverflow). If you have around 3,000 album covers like me, you would know that this is a slow PITA experience. If I put the iTunes library and AlbumArt directory on D:\, my machine will theoretically have TWO SSDs running.

I guess nobody knows the answer to my question because nobody cares enough to make it work like this. I'll buy a Momentus XT and see what happens.

EDIT: It looks like they haven't ironed out all issues yet: http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-and/bd-p/Momentus

 

From what I remember from what others have said about the Momentus XT, unless whatever data you happen to be looking for on the XT happens to be in the cache (and unless you use it frequently, it won't be), then the XT will have to spin up just like any other HDD, and will show no speed advantages when in use as a data drive. The way most people have been taking to get around this is to set things so that the XT never spins down; of course, if you do that, you could do that with any other drive as well and it would react exactly the same.

 

Personally I would not get the Momentus XT for a MacBook, I have heard to many bad stories about it. I heard some firmware update fixed it, but still meh... I'd rather not risk it.

However I was perfectly happy to order it with my pc! =]

If you didn't have a Mac I would say go for it, since that 4gb of nand while not much can give ur drive time to speed up me thinks. Ur prbly much more knowledgeable about times it takes for HDD to speed up then me. Idk the specs for these drives, but my guts tell me Momentus XT should spin up faster since it has less platters (500 vs 750) in it and the flash.

 

The 750 GB 9.5 mm drives are all dual platter like the 500 GB XT.

 

That's weird. Two guys in my office have XTs in their MBPs (dunno about the [FW] version they have), and absolutely love them. Perhaps mileage varies.

 

Yes, on the data drive, the iTunes Album Art directory should get accessed the most. I'd have a bunch of archived movies there that never get watched, a bunch of mp3s that never get played. The album covers would get used every day since I'm always flipping through them. Plus, those files would be the smallest on the drive and therefore prime candidates to be put onto the 4GB SLC. mp3s and avis would not.

 

It's not the size of the file that matters, but whichever blocks of data the firmware feels are most accessed and thus will automatically cache in the NAND. This isn't necessarily an entire file; since the caching is all hardware/firmware based, and independent of the file system, it may just be part of a file that gets accessed often. You don't actually get a choice in the matter. I'm not saying that it might not work out as you hope; just that in general terms, using an XT as a data drive doesn't seem to work out a whole lot better than using a regular drive.

In the end, though, I think the only way to find out for sure for you is to try it.

 

I'm sorry I stand corrected, guess that's what I get for assuming. My name suits me well don't you think.

since you seem to know the most, I'm gonna agree with you that if using it as a data drive you won't see as much of the magic, but should just go with the one you can get the best deal for. I think they will both spin up the same so I guess it comes down to this... 250GB of HDD or 4GB of ssd, lol the ssd vs HDD debate kinda always comes down to that huh?

 

AnandTech

"A hybrid drive really just attempts to do what my setup of two drives (SSD + HDD) does manually: put small, frequently used data on NAND flash and put larger, less frequently used data on platters."

I've decided to start with the Scorpio Blue. If it stays on low power idle and not go to sleep, things should be fine.

 

I have a 500GB XT here, was in my Vaio E as a primary drive until about a month ago when the performance suddenly went terrible. Would lock up making the entire system pause for 1 second or so on regular intervals. Have been unnable to troubleshoot it so I had to clone the drive on to my factory Toshiba 500GB to make the PC usable.

Completely unsure why the XT decided to suddenly become unusable though - going to RMA it this week and see if a new one does the same thing.

However, I would probably not buy another one now.

 

What bugs me about this issue is that firmware 24 fixed the issues for a lot of people. So, I think there are two things going on:

1. they all needed firmware; and in addition
2. there are a bunch of defective drives

As much as I want one, I just can't bother with all that troubleshooting. I've built enough computers to know that I don't want to build them.

 

My issues started appearing a few weeks after I upgraded to SD24, so I'm assuming my drive is just defective. You're right - I don't want to deal with this hassle, this is why I stopped building computers years ago.

 

Right, the hybrid drive does automatically what you would normally have to do manually (in the case of the SSD + HDD). Note how further down he talks more specifically about LBAs; these are Logical Block Addresses, or clusters of data on the hard drive platter. LBAs are the actual addresses of your files; basically, your file is made up of several LBAs. Now, the firmware of the Momentus only looks at LBAs; it doesn't have a built-in file system, so it can't actually know what files occupy what LBAs. Thus, it just keeps track of which LBAs the file system requests from it most often, and copies those LBAs to the NAND. Also note his comment about how "it's not very difficult to get data evicted from the NAND cache if you throw a random set of applications/workloads at the drive." This means that if your data requests aren't fairly regular, what you "expect" to be cached could easily be forced out.

Scorpio Blue sounds like a decent choice; I suspect you'll have to fiddle with the spin-down settings either in Windows or through something like APM to keep it from spinning down.

 

I am not a Mac guy, but in power settings in windows I set my drives to not sleep. At least on AC. Can you do this in your Mac? If so. then just find the best priced hdd with the space you need.

 

On my G73 I run a ssd and a scorp black. Get the best of both and run apps on the ssd, keep data on the black.

 

The problem is that Apple makes horrendous software. I'm not an Apple guy either, even though at this point I've only got one Win7 machine and 4 Apples. Anyway, some ppl were saying that they would make settings on their drives through OS X but the drives would ignore the OS. I know this is true of the Momentus XT. I can't recall if I've read the same issue on the Scorpios. Probably not, but since Apple can't do basic things right like switching between discrete and integrated graphics, I wouldn't expect other basic things to work right either.

 

UPDATE: So, if anyone is in the same predicament, I thought I'd weigh in on my experience with the Western Digital 750GB Scorpio Blue.

Noise: Very, very, very quiet. Considering it's a mechanical drive, I'm quite happy with it. Seek noises are very faint, if ever audible. I'm nuts about noise and frequently research SPCR.

Battery Life: No adverse effects. Depending on what I'm doing, the battery indicator will fluctuate between 10+ hrs and 3hrs. Ballpark guess says I'm losing a maximum 30 minutes of life out of an average 6 hours. No basis for that guess. Grain of salt.

Speed: No comment on sequential speeds, which I suspect are quite low. As far as my iTunes album cover problem, this drive proves to be a non-issue and renders the Momentus XT not useful for my needs. iTunes directory (and album art directory) were placed on SSD. Album thumbnail browsing is instant without lag whatsoever.

Conclusion: As a second drive, Scorpio Blue is highly recommended, particularly Mac users having trouble with Momentus XT drives.

 

I know quite a few people with Macbooks that love their XT. The latest firmware fixed all the issues.

Except for the increase in vibration though...

 

SD24 or SD25? I have yet to try SD25.

 

I just put in SD25, seems faster than before but I am not one to tell, I just also upgraded the main board to a P79 and now have a [email protected] GHz..........

 

the latest.. SD25.

With increase in vibration I did not mean from the firmware...