Seagate Momentus XT 500GB noise levels and reliability.

Hi,

I've been shopping for a new hard drive, and unfortunately SSD's are still out of my budget. I've been very impressed at the reviews of the Seagate Momentus XT, but was wondering if its a noisy drive. The last seagate i had (250gb 7200) that came with my dell precision made loud clicks and was rather annoying. dell replaced it with a same spec samsung and its much better.


also, im wondering if thers any data on the reliability of the drive.

cheers

 

So long as you do not have one of the deviants that needs an RMA the noise and vibration to me is no better or worst than a 7K500 or older 320 Black. These aree too new for a reliability study yet.

These do not suffer the clicking etc of the old 7200.4's but if you have a bad one you will know right off the bat. They will either buzz like a cell phone on vibrate or have a nice high pitched squeal or both............

 

so would you say that the noise wouldnt be an issue? the other drive i'm considering is the hitachi travelstar 7K500. price isnt too much of a difference. do you notice a clear performance increase in real world use from the 7K500?

also, any idea what happens if the memory dies? will the entire drive be corrupt?

 

The NAND will likely outlive the platters by a LONG time.

 

also, looking at the benchmarks, power consumption seems to be significantly higher. is this noticable in actual use?

the worrying benchmark was the video playback one on toms hardware

 

I have it in the U81a, I had a 7K500 there and 8 GB memory card for ready boost. With it like that Windows showed, and it performed as such, to have 6:00 of battery in power saver mode. Now with the XT I will see 6:45 and it performs as such as well. I haven't seen a descrease but an increase of battery life. Now this could be as the drive has to seek alot less in real life usage.

It is just as smooth and quiet as the 7K500 it replaced, so again I have had no issues. My daughter has one in her LT3103u too and has enjoyed the performance increase but that also was coming from a 5400 RPM 250GB drive with 4 GB readyboost.

Unless you are doing alot of writes to the drive all the time and or use a lot of different programs all the time you will see a big difference over time. Unlike a typical HDD though you need to limit defrags to once a month or more. The reason being as you defrag you reset the cached areas of the drive. This causes HDD access till the SSD section relearns your usage patterns again.

I have had no issues with video playback of even HD files from my camcorder. Just too be sure on battery I just loaded a video on my U81a and rebooted 5 times so the first viewing was not cached but it would start caching on the other loads. It is a 7 minute 384 MB 1080P video file and it played flawlessly each time....................

 

the video playback benchmark was for battery life, it was quite a bit shorter than the 7k500.

dosent windows 7 defrag automatically when the computer is idle?

 

I had the XT in my notebook two days for testing.

It's slightly more noisy and creates more vibration than a 7K500. My notebook is a thin and light HP DM3 though. I would expect the Dell Precision M4400 to be much better at blocking noise and vibration.

The performance blows the 7K500 and any 7200rpm hard drive away.

Tomshardware have been saying they lost 1 hour of battery life with the XT. My experience was the opposite. The XT proved to be very power efficient. More like Techreport's review showed.

 

I had not tested battery life in comparison to the 7K500 with video etc, I knew only for my casual use it seems as good or better. The U81a is light but not especially thin. The mounting etc is pretty solid so it tends to shield vibration and noise. So again for my use it is as good as the 7K500.

In my P7805 I've had the 320 Black, Momentus XT and 7K500 as the secondary drive. I couldn't again tell the difference between the lot for noise and vibration. This though is a larger even more sturdy chasis so again there is klittle chance to see the differences. The system eats battery at amazing amounts so the small differences in the drives is inconsequential.

 

any news on the grapevine about them releasing an XT version of the 750gb drive? hopefully with a bigger memory portion?

also, any news about competitors working on a hybrid drive?

cheers