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

I'm happy to hear it seems normal to you In fact, I'm used only to 4200rpm drive (previous laptop), which can explain my surprise when hearing that. As you say, after seeking, they come back, but it's the first time in my life I hear the head come back, and here it's clearly audible.

I'm glad you say that because I also was wondering why it's seeking so much. It's a new laptop, Acer 4820TG, 4GB RAM, W7 brand new and NOT Acer edition. The PC had just been started, I was doing nothing on it, when recorded. It was not even the auto-indexing since I had the mouse move some seconds before.

I work in a very quiet environment, and the laptop fans are rarely running, since it's on battery saving mode usually (Intel GMA graphic card and underclocked CPU in this mode). But even when the fans are running, and when my Ati starts, I can still clearly hear all these HDD sounds. I even hear better the "clac" than the seeking, when siting 5 meters from my laptop.

Laptop now you know Surface: a normal large wood desk, but it's the same point on every surface (my tvroom glass table, my office's hard metal/wood desk...)

SD23 ( edited)

Ok, when you're saying "very similar to" you mean you could distinctly hear the "clac" after seeking?

Thanks to both for your much appreciated help!

 

So, is this considered the 'crippling pausing issue'? (1st image)
I am happy to say and see the performance stabilizes when the block size is say, 256K (the 2nd image).

 

Hi!

I'm back with my vibrations and noises So I finally updated to SD24 and... nothing got better. Nothing worse either I must say.

The HDD is still vibrating too much, echoing in any desk the laptop is on, and the seeing noise is still followed up by an odd "clac" sound of head parking.

The only interesting finding I did was to make the crews holding the disk a little looser. That helped (less vibrations).

In performances neither did i see any change. But I noticed, like m8o, that i'm getting drops down in HD Tune pro (I'm having them for 2 days now, so even before I flashed the firmware).

 

Well my daughter didn't listen and used her LT3103 on the leather couch while laying on it! to make a long stroy short the video fried and I have an extra XT drive.

So in the P7805-u I replaced the 7K500 with the XT that has SD24 on it. I wasn't expecting much better performance but WOW. Now that it has cached the files I use often it is super fast. Whee I used to watch it build htumbnails slowly in large picture folders they just appear now. when it does have to rebuild it seems much faster than the 7K500 too.

These definately are a nice storage drive, guess it is up to the user if it is worth the price premium.....

 

Ninj,

A very small percentage of people have complained about vibrations in the past, so it is possible that your drive might have an issue. Do you have another 7200rpm 2.5" that you can compare it to? Before I had the Momentum XT I had the Momentus 7200.4 500gb drive so I was unable to tell a difference between them in terms of NVH. I also have several other 2.5" drives such as a WD Scorpio Blue 500gb, also a 320gb, and I can't really tell a difference between them with NVH. If you have a friend who has a 7200rpm notebook drive you can compare it to them as well. I assume when you put the Momentus XT in a USB enclosure it still vibrates excessively to you? I recommend you post in the Seagate community forums and also read the posts there. You may want to RMA that drive and have Seagate send you another.

 

My two XT's are as, if not more, smoother than either my Black 320GB or 7K500. I had one XT RMA'd that buzzed in an enclosure and a 7200.4 that eventually vibrated itself to death................

 

Kinda OT, but are you from the Aardvark in Shelby Township, MI?

 

No, I'm not. I googled it to see what you were referring to - the reviews looked hit or miss

 

regli, I wanted to thank you for this awesome tutorial and steps on how
to update the firmware on my hard drive using a USB flash drive since I
dont have an disc drive on my Alienware M11x. Everything worked out as
planned out by you! ^_^ Thank you so very much, now my new Momentus
XT 500gb Hybrid HDD is running quieter under SD24 firmware. Those of you
who were having issues updating firmware running the executable file in
windows, make sure you follow these steps. They worked out like a charm
for me! Once again, thank you regli.

 

Glad it worked out for you. I was hoping somebody would put it to the test using SD24. At some point we might even see some "real world" benchmarks of this drive with various acoustic management settings...

 

Nice! Will be looking forward to that ^_^ and yes it worked like a charm!
You are the man!

 

To all of you who own this HDD, could you help me decide wiether mine is too vibrating?

* When in my laptop, when I put my ankles on the laptop for typing, vibrations are clearly passing in my hands, not really disturbing, but still annoying.

* My laptop's screen is in aluminium, it vibrates too: if i make it touch the wall very lightly, i can hear it clearly (vibration on screen on wall)

* When on a hard surface, out of laptop, let's say glass, vibration on the surface sounds like a faraway engine, two streets from home.

I wonder weither to RMA it or not, depending on what you guys experience with it. Because on the other hand, i know that returning a piece of computer system is always risky: it often comes back worse or with another problem.

Thank you!

 

Yeah somewhat here as well. I can feel the viration more than with the hard
drive my laptop came with, which was a wd blue hdd. But since the Alienware
M11x is so rough it's not a super vibration, but when my hands are on the
wrist rest I can feel the hdd spinning. Which before I didnt with the default
hard drive... but I dont mind... Everything is running super fast! It's awesome!

 

I just bought a momentus xt 500gb from the market place.

After reading quite a few pages of this thread, The only thing I need to do is update the firmware when I get it.

I also read that this drive doesn't have a motion sensor, will this be an issue?

 

Whoah, you feel the vibration in your hands "when you put your ankles on the laptop for typing"? Man, apart from your somewhat unusual typing technique, that must be one hell of a vibrating drive...

 

Hahhaa he's not a native english speaker, give him a break

Should be wrists im sure hehe

 

How come on newegg I see two different 500GB xt's? One is 100~ one is 140~

 

Probably OEM vs retail. For some reason my workplace OEM 500GB MomentusXT is 30 bucks more than retail packaging...

 

In both my U81a and P7805u you can not feel them running at all. When I had the out of the now deal LT3103u I had to pull 45 GB of user files off usb 2.0 with just the enclosure interface on the drive. while it was warm it was silky smooth................

 

Is there anything special to installing the Momentus XT as the program drive? My friend is going to have a 60-120 GB SSD as the main boot drive in the G73-SW.

 

Does by any chance anyone have a link to any post that details how I can install sd24 on my xt drives (witout an usb stick as I dont have one at hand). Thanks

 

go to seagate.com its there

they have a well made fancy program you just run it and it reboots your system and installs it.

you dont need a usb stick or anything like that.

If you lose power I guess you could brick it.

 

Well I tried the program there and doesn't update the drivers. Running the utility to check drives if they need updates, it says they dont need any updating (and they are running sd22).

 

What's wrong w/the instructions spiktsu included in his "thank-you" reply?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...brid-hdd-w-built-4gb-ssd-141.html#post7091306

It doesn't "require" a USB drive, that's just the easiest way to do it. You could use the 100Meg system partition made at the start of the drive when you partitioned it (assuming you're disk partition was made w/an alignment aware method).

 

I know what you mean, same thing would happen to me. But I dont have a
disc drive in my laptop.. That's why I had to go USB's route. Which thanks to
regli everything worked like a charm! But on your case I'm guessing you have a
disc drive, just download the iso. file and burn it. Then re-boot from disk and
follow the prompt instructions. Good luck.

 

I'm trying to go the usb way, but the HP disk tool doesn't show the option of FAT file system. What now?
LE: Tried the cd ISO from seagate's website and it says no model detected.

 

I would guess, try another USB flash drive device. The one I worked with was
a very old USB flash drive. Only 256mb... Maybe that's why it show that option
on my. How big is your USB flash drive? The ISO. option didnt detect the drive?
Now... that's weird...

 

I tried the manual flash command (taken from seagate forums) and same thing as the auto flash from iso cd: please press c to go back to windows/linux immediatly after trying to flash. No hd activity, no nothing, still sd22. Should i first update to sd23 and than to sd24? or it shouldnt matter?

LE: I updated in the end, i kept forgetting to put the hdds in ide mode, silly me.

 

No, but if your friend already has an SSD as the main boot drive then he is not really going to see any benefit to having the XT. In fact, they will be better of with a standard 750GB drive. The XT shows the most benefit when it is the main boot drive but since he has an SSD, that defeats the object in my opinion.

 

It would still help with loading of programs, especially more resource intensive ones like Adobe apps, Sony Vegas, things like that. Also would help with game loading if he puts games on there, so you still would see good improvement over a regular spindle drive, and since he already has an SSD as a boot drive, the performance disparity wont be as large as with a spindle drive. The XT won't cache media like music, pics or video, so the cache would be used exclusively for programs in that scenario.

 

I just ordered the 500GB one along with a MSI FX603 which comes with a 5400rpm drive, I'll update with how much it helps me. 90% of my computer usage comes from one tiny old game, Windows and browsing the net or watching videos so I assume it should fit my needs pretty well.

I was a little concerned about the problems I've heard about but hopefully it will all work out with the firmware update and the HDParm etc fixes (APM mode etc).

EDIT: Do I need ACHI mode to be on from BIOS for the HDD to function up to its capabilities?

Cheers!

 

I dont know what sort of test to use I use hdtune pro

I have both of my hard drives installed internally in my g72.

The 7k500 is faster in every measurement except access time which the xt is faster in

Admittedly they are essentially the same speed but the 7k500 is faster by a tic

It is much faster in burst speed, it aparently goes up to 260 mb/s

the 7k500 runs 4 degrees cooler in the same position. Both are cool enough 38/42 in testing usage.


both are silent. I cannot detect a vibration with my ear next to them running.
I do believe the seagate is quieter. I cant hear it at all really, I can hear the hitachi when spinning.
Someone complained about noise but I have to believe this is the quietest hd ever. I cant hear it.

Sound comparison between

320 gb 5400 rpm toshiba
500 gb seagate 5400.6

Both detectably noisier. Both run 5 degress cooler in testing, 33


I dont have a power draw testing utility Id be very interested.

 

Yes, and if you're using Win7 it's pretty easy to enable it in Win7 before you flip the BIOS. If you're using XP, the process is more involved. Details:
Switching the BIOS SATA's Mode from IDE to AHCI

 

I'd like to see a large file copy benchmark (2 GB+) using a program like FastCopy

Also, while you are at it, do benchmarks using various levels of AAM.

 

Wiating for mine. Should be here anyday. Going to do a fresh install of Windows. Will it affect the XTif I leave one drive in that isn't an XT? I'll have one XT and one WD 7200RPM drive. Thoughts...?

 

I have not been able to set the aam on either of my hard drives.

It says error while setting aam

they are both set at the quietest

 

Hmm. Is there a way to install SD24 other than the in-OS update utility and without a bootable CD? The update utility doesn't seem to be working on my Dellienware, and, of course, it doesn't have an ODD.

Should I just make a DOS boot-up USB stick and paste the stuff from the .iso image into it? And then run what commands?

 

You might want to try the hdparm utility as outlined in my post here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...brid-hdd-w-built-4gb-ssd-130.html#post7009249

Use the following command from the Windows Command Prompt to set AAM levels (from 128 to 254) for the first hard disk.

hdparm -M254 /dev/hda (to set it to fastest)

Use this command to verify that it was successful.

hdparm -M /dev/hda

 

Follow the instructions here and simply boot from the USB stick and then follow the prompts:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...brid-hdd-w-built-4gb-ssd-124.html#post6975720

 

Nub question #2: I seem to be doing something wrong, here. I go to the ODIN file and it's telling me the DOS files are not compatible with FAT32. Google's not helping in this regard. There's only choices for NTFS and FAT32.

Oh, by the way, what command do I run when the prompt pops up?

 

duplicate post.

 

You may be using too large a USB stick which might disable the FAT option. Search for a 2GB (4 GB?) or smaller stick if you can and try again to see if the FAT option appears. It definitely does with mine.

As to what happens later, the FreeDOS boot invokes the equivalent of an autoexec.bat file which starts the firmware upgrade process. However, you have to get there first.

 

I will just leave it on in BIOS when installing OS and include the drivers on a custom CD if I do decide to go with XP (like I'm assuming). That process looks like a lot of work so this should be the easier way to go. My XT just arrived today so I'm just waiting for my new laptop to get here tomorrow and I'll see how it goes. It says on top of the HDD that it came with SD23 so it looks like I'll have to update the firmware as well!

Thanks for letting me know I need AHCI though.

 

Well, definitely not 4GB. Not FAT option there, either. Man, you know technology is real cheap when your USB flash drive isn't small enough.

Heh. Oh well, I need to order a batch of USB drives, anyway, I'll add in a 2GB one.

 

Won't filling up your 4GB decrease performance? I heard that you're not supposed to fill SSD's all the way.

 

Er, filling up 4 GB of what? If you're referring to the 4 GB of NAND in the XT, _you_ can't. You can't even look at it manually, it's all handled automatically. And the decrease in performance for SSDs is limited to the write performance, in that writes tend to slow down as the drive fills up due to write amplification. Again, since writes to the XT 4 GB NAND are invisible to you, you would never notice. If you're talking about filling up a 4 GB flash drive, under normal usages, speed doesn't come into play at all, especially since flash drives are usually not optimized for multiple channel input like SSDs. As well, the general speed of a flash drive is, again, usually not high enough for you to notice.

 

Not talking about flash drives. Talking about the nand cache, I personally can't fill it but obviously the drive fills itself. I didn't realize that only writes were effected.

 

When you receive your smaller USB flash drive just follow regli's steps and
everything should work out for you. I used a 246mb flash drive hahaha Yep..
That's an old one... I just wanted to let you know regli's methods work.
I have a Dell Alienware M11x as well (no optical drive). Good luck.

 

Got two of these 500GB Momentus XT drives today. Both brand new sealed with warranty.
Already have a SSD though, so I'll probably end up selling them on eBay!

 

How big is your SSD?