Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HDD w/ built-in 4GB SSD

The Windows ver update did not work for me, but the ISO worked just fine.

 

ok will do. how long does the whole process take?

 

darnit my bd-rom seems to be misaligned again and i cant seem to read/write with it.
anybody know if how to make the sd24 iso into a bootable usb drive?

 

The process takes a min or so, not too long.

 

Here you go. See the link in Pita's post. I used it the other day myself to create a bootable Win. 7 DVD.

I would either download the ISO file and extract it to a folder, then use the Bootable tool. Or, just download the regular FW and use the tool on that file.

 

i made a dos bootable usb drive and copied the contents of the iso there but that didnt seem to work.
ill try this out

edit:
would i be able to run the extracted contents of the iso file in safe mode?

 

^^^ Okay, I just tried several ways to make a bootable USB from the FW files/iso etc. but no luck for me either. I guess your best bet now would be to create the bootable CD.

PS: Not sure about the Safe mode question.

 

kinda sucks that we cant get it to work on usb.
good thing im not having any real issues with my xt or it wouldve been a pita

 

I've updated to FW SD24 and the only issue that I've noticed is that the Hard Drive Protection of Sony Vaio S is not working. (via Vaio Control Center, that option dissapeared of the menu)

 

I updated mine a few days ago. But now the Bios doesn't detect the drive and takes forever to get past Post. It seems to be fine once it does boot but any ideas?

*Update* Ok Now I think it might be bricked..

 

Vergleich: Notebook-Festplatten im Test - CHIP Online

 

Bricked right after you update your HDD or you managed to use it a couple of times before it failed?

 

It worked a few times. I pulled the HDD out and disconnected the battery. Let it sit for 15 mins. Put everything back in and it works fine now. Maybe my laptop needed a full complete cold boot. It has booted 5 times in a row now no issues. Hmmmm.

 

Thanks +1.

So is that first part a rating system? 100 is highest for that category? Sorry, not real familiar with that site (as I don't speak german). I did google translate all the categories so I at least know what they represent.

By the way, the Intel 120GB is now $204.99 at newegg.com with $35 MIR cash card = $170. I bought it.

Newegg.com - Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH120G2K5 2.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

yes, the drives were scored on 5 categories, highest rating is 100.

 

I currently have a Seagate momentus XT with a regular Seagate momentus 500gig in raid config on my desktop using the marvell controller on my mobo. I do not know if the Momentus XT is utilizing its Solid state memory or if its just acting as the regular momentus. Both are 500 gig but only 1 is the XT. I know they are not met for raid but it seems to work for Storage in Raid 0 config. I have a gigabyte x58a-ud3r mobo it has 3 diff raid controllers.

 

well i guess it uses it's ssd, but the slower disk will completely kill all the benefits. in a typical raid0, chance is very low to only access data of one disk. => no matter how fast the one disk is, the other will always slow you down. at least for the low-latency thing.

would be interesting to test two xt in one raid setup, though..

 

i have stuck this in my laptop and wished i had not bothered, i see very little speed improvement. are there any tweaks? i have a SSD in my pc and that is lighting quick. Also what's with the WEI scores? is it really 5.9? or is there a bug?

 

WEI score IS the bug..means absolutely nothing

My improvement is just the opposite, which laptop drive were you replacing? Yes, I gather your very expensive SSD will be quicker. I just wondering what your expectations were?

You have not said how you restored your OS, clone? I got great results by doing a clean install. You should get better results after the drive gets the catch set up for your usage.

I will have a SSD in the future, no question, when price for the space offered is more in line with normal drives

 

yeah did a clean install and came from a normal seagate momentus. i guess i was hoping for a big speed increase, but not major, i knew it would be off in terms of normal SSD. but like you i needed space not speed. i guess i hoped for a little more. any tweaks worth trying?

 

Ya I think it took about 5 reboots before it started booting faster for me


Other than very commonly used files it should be about the same as otehr 7200 500 gb drives.

 

phil had me install the irst drivers and keep my machine in high performance mode.
i think they have helped a lot.

 

Phil may have some ideas for you, sorry I'm not doing anything special to the drive.

As mentioned, if your moving from another fast 7k drive, you may not see a major difference.

If you still have your old drive intact you could try some benches like time to boot or time to start normally slow starting apps like PS. This is where I saw my biggest gains. If you are just not seeing anything satisfactory, I would get the drive back for refund if still possible.

I went for the space but htwingnut found a tempting deal on a 120GB drive

 

The XT needs some time to 'learn'. After a couple of reboots it booted my system in 14 seconds where an SSD needed 12 seconds.

If you're not seeing fast boots and application launches there's something wrong.

Make sure Intel RST is running.

 

Keeping your machine in High performance mode will mean that even when idle, your CPU will be at a higher clock rate and hotter than it needs to be. I find the balanced profile much better and my XT performance is still fine.

 

How do I check if Intel RST is running?

I agree. There's a big thread I made about this:

Power Plan Controversy

 

I've been on balanced profile for the last four years..I guess people were misinterpreting the performance mode as "over clocked" or something

Now that I under volt, thanks to flipfire and others, I sort of get the best of both worlds..

 

theres was an issue with the pm55 chipset and ssd performance discovered by some nbr contributors. one way to avoid this was keeping your laptop in high performance mode.
some have suggested that momentus xt users with the pm55 chipset should also benefit by keeping their machines in high performance.

 

So I thought I was OK. but now im getting random BSODs because the Bios doesn't see my drive. This all started when I updated my firmware. Can I restore the older firmware or is that not recommended?

 

I don't think this is actually true...

 

ill switch it back to balanced then

 

so whats the consensus on the sd24 firmware upgrade?

 

The main problem I had with my drive before the update was the hdd was very LOUD. It seems to be much better now. It may even be a little faster on reboots too. haven't seen any problems on my Alienware M15x

 

I didn't do it with the SD24 ISO but with the CC35 firmware upgrade for the ST32000542AS. I assume that the same procedure works for SD24.

Download FreeDos (fdbasecd.iso) and mount or extract it to a known destination.

Download and install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

Now run the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (HPUSBFW) as Admin. Chose the desired drive and make sure that you use FAT as the "File System". If desired chose "Quick Format" and then select "Create a DOS startup disk".

Now browse to the relative directory \FREEDOS\SETUP\ODIN where you extracted FreeDos to and click start to format the USB drive.

You have just created a bootable DOS drive.


Next we need to extract the Seagate Image file ( Winimage) onto this drive.

Extract the MomentusXT-ALL-SD24 ISO file into a separate directory using Winrar or equivalent.

Inside this directory you should see a file called AN-SD24.ima which contains some duplicate FreeDos files (command.com and kernel.sys) but also more importantly the firmware update files.

Extract this image file using Winimage or mount it in MagicISO and extract/copy the files into the USB stick's root directory.

Your USB drive should now look like this:

09/24/2010 08:11 AM 2,107 FDAUTO.BAT
02/10/2010 09:51 AM 327 FDCONFIG.SYS
03/23/2005 09:03 PM 14,036 FINDTDSK.EXE
07/07/2005 06:48 PM 7,736 HIMEM.EXE
12/05/2010 03:17 PM 665,403 LOD.zip
05/26/2007 05:18 PM 4,933 NANSI.SYS
04/05/2010 07:21 AM 341,140 SFLASH.ZIP
01/31/1993 03:10 AM 13,740 TDSK.EXE
05/26/2004 04:57 PM 30,226 UNZIP.EXE
9 File(s) 1,079,648 bytes

You are now ready to boot from the USB drive and start the firmware upgrade process.


Sorry for the thread diversion but it seems to be a common problem.

EDIT
p.s. You can also extract the IMA file using 7-Zip making the process even easier.

 

thanks for that post.
i know how to make a bootable usb which i use to flash my gpu.
however i just couldnt extract the sd24 file using winrar, poweriso nor demon tools lite.
now i know how.
ill try it out. +1

 

Seagate uses FreeDos so you should use it as well otherwise more changes need to be made. Note the FDAUTO.BAT and FDCONFIG.SYS instead of autoexec.bat and config.sys.

 

If it works +2 for regli.

But yea, as others have mentioned; since the fw upgrade my drive has been like ~80% quieter. (I guess that 'Acoustics' thing is really working)

Haven't had my drive/(notebook) long enough to really judge the speed. So the speed seems about the same for me; As well as batt. life. No issues for sure though, so that's a plus.

 

Is this a setting somewhere to enable?

How do I check that?

 

You can enable/disable it using HD Tune Pro. Just download the evaluation version.

HD Tune website

BTW, when I upgraded the firmware on my ST32000542 it set the AAM level to 128, the lowest, i.e. quietest level. However this is also the level with the worst performance. I then reset it to max (254) and benchmark performance improved by about 20% on average.

 

So what is the procedure for updating to the SD24 firmware? I tried using the firmware updater utility form seagate's site, but it does not work. The installer works fine and it reboots my computer, but when it starts up the updater utility (before the OS), it just detects the drive and then does nothing more; I waited about 5 minutes and nothing happened; there was no HDD activity. When I rebooted, seatools still said that the hard drive was using the SD23 firmware.

 

Download the ISO and burn it to cd. Then reboot to the cd and run it from there.

 

anyone have any experience with how well the caching algorithm works with linux?

 

Do the settings in HD tune stick even if it's not running in the background? By the way, setting from 128 to 256 is a dramatic speed difference.

 

BradI,

I can't even get it to change the AAM settings period (even as administrator the 'operation failed').

Running the 'test' below will eventually get it to .3 ms or lower - it will be using the nand. Using the computer for about 10 minutes showed no difference either way - best use of HDTune is uninstalling it.

 

It sticks on mine both for the Seagate and Samsung drives.

In fact, my Seagate performance benchmarks with both levels (128 & 254) were taken with the drives in my Buffalo LS-WXL NAS. To set the AAM levels I had them hooked up temporarily to my desktop.

 

Thanks. But here is a problem I am now having. HDTune found an error on one of the disk sectors. I tried to run chkdisk and it said the computer would need to reboot. So I did that and it hung every time chkdisk tried to start processing. I tried a dozen times and it counted down from 10 to 1 and hung on 1 every time. (btw I flashed my motherboard bios to the latest version yesterday.)

Any tools that can repair this bad sector?

 

Try first using repair on the DOS based SeaTools.

| Seagate

I assume that you have a somewhat recent backup.

 

Is this drive recommended as a secondary/storage drive? Should I go for a WD Scorpio Black instead?

Thanks

 

Not really, usage as a secondary or storage drive will negate most of the advantages of an XT... meaning you end up with a HDD that performs about as well as a regular one at twice the price.

 

Using boot timer I keep getting boot times of around 40 seconds on my laptop. Is this too long for a momentus XT? I am running norton antivirus as well as steam at startup; could all of these programs slow it down this much? I have seen others stating they have been in the 20 second range.