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

Switch off the laptop, and remove both drives. Make sure you note which drive was connected to each SATA port !
Now plug ONE of the drives into a different machine, boot the CD, and update the firmware. DON'T boot into Windows.
Switch the drives, and repeat the process to update the second drive.

Now put them back into your laptop, and voila.

 

Well, I bit the bullet and tried to run the utitlity from windows. (the CD from seagate didnt work because it has dell's version of the firmware)

Anyways, i ran it with both drives setup in the raid, when it rebooted, it identified both drives seperately and tried to update them, but it turns out that the new drives already have the new bios, so it identified that both drives were up to date and flashed success in big blue letters.

Doesnt really tell us if it would be successfull in a raid, but at least it identified both drives.

 

For others who may come across this thread, and need to identify the [FW]...

If you have Intel Rapid Storage Technology 10.x utility installed, you just run the RST utility, click the "Manage" button at the top. It should list the RAID array on the side w/ your two XTs. Clicking on the XT/HDD button will show you the drive's info including serial number as well as firmware.

 

No need to do that at all, just boot to DOS, update the firmware, and boot back to windows. No need to remove the drives at all. I did this exact same process on my wifes system and no prob, it was these drives in a raid also.

 

In case anyone missed it, the new model has shown up on Newegg for $239.

Discussion is here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...s-xt-750gb-w-8gb-nand-more-7.html#post8104001

 

500 GB model is $90 on Newegg and Amazon

 

That must be for the older 4gb SS. The new one has 8gb.

 

It's also 750GB and costs $240. 500GB for $90 is a much better deal, even for only 4GB SS.

 

It's ~ $150 now because of the flooding in Thailand.

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB

 

Anyone knows a place where i can find this drive with a good discount for tommorow ?

 

Flooding thing so prices are high now - For 3-6 months supply will be slow from what BBC news says.

Is there a newer model with 8GB SS?

Has the 750GB XT with 8GB SS come out? Where?

 

@ crashnburn http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...s-xt-750gb-w-8gb-nand-more-7.html#post8104001

 

It was $90 from roughly the 24th-26th. Proof: Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 2.5 Inch Solid State Hybrid Drive ST95005620AS | Amazon price tracker / tracking, Amazon price history charts, Amazon price watches, Amazon price drop alerts | camelcamelcamel.com

[dead] Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS Newegg FS Subscriber only $ 89.99 24 hours only sale - Slickdeals.net

That's why I posted that price - not OUTSTANDING but a decent deal and even more rare considering the flooding. I still passed because I seem to only hear negative things about these drives failing after a few months.

 

Could you guys send a pm or post here if you see a good discount on this drive similar to that of 90$ ?

I want to buy it till Christmas but the price is a little high for me right now.

Thanks

 

I've been wondering about getting a laptop with this drive. I've read about some vibrations and noises coming from it. If that is the case how noticable and distracting are they?

 

This can vary by the drive itself. Some report no noticable increase while some drives will rival your cell phone. There is an apparent drive manufacturing issue with the platters. My first of two drives was one of these and vibrated so bad the drive kept resetting itself. One RMA later and I have two smooth running XT's...............

 

SSD is the way to go, especially for the OS install. Momentus is kind of an odd tech imo, i don't see the point.

Kinda off-topic, but that "next laptop" in your siggy sounds pretty damn powerful considering a 1tb SSD would still be sky high in price even at the end of 2013. According to all the other specs, it should maybe be named late 2013-2014 laptop haha (HD 8000 series!? lmao not for a while.)

 

Not everyone like to spend 200$ for 100GB+ storage.....
plus i think these XTs are great for those who have only one hard drive bay and don't want to loose their optical drive.....

 

So whats the deal with Raid and 2 of these XT's? I assume RAID doubles the NAND flash memory capacity? So if I use 2 500gig XT's with 4gigs of NAND each I get in reality 8gigs? Shouldnt that improve the read caching significantly and allow for larger programs to be read off the flash memory instead of the platters?

 

Doesn't really work like that - the nand is 'invisible' to the O/S so in RAID they're still operating independently as 2x 4GB not as 1x 8GB which performance-wise is a huge difference.

Also, the firmware makes a huge difference too. The 'old' XT after repeating the same 'run' 4 times or more is still slower or equal to the new XT on the first 'run' (ie: it learns much, much faster what to cache). After 3 or 4 runs, the new XT is equal to or better than SSD's (when it can cache the 'run' fully).

 

If you go through this forum, there have been some mixed results w/ RAID-0 on the XTs. I believe it works for most, but others have reported lost RAID volumes (which means reloading in RAID-0), even though the disks check out individually. Also, that was also with older firmware running on the drives, so I don't know if this is a problem when running SD28 on the 1st Gen XTs.

It has also been reported that RAID-5 does not work correctly w/ these drives as there may be some kind of power issue. It appears when the RAID controller queries the drive to see if it is alive, the drive doesn't respond if it has been reading from the SSD or has gone to a low power mode. The controller then drops the drive from the volume and runs the RAID volume"degraded."


In regards to your question, up to 8GB can be cached, yes. But what actually ends up cached might be a different story.

So, RAID-0 is supposed to evenly distribute written data among all the drives participating in the array, and this would be dependent on RAID's stripe size. However, if you have a bunch of small files that fall within the stripe that are read over and over again, those may end up on one of the disk's SSD cache, while the other SSD cache remains empty. So, in the end it will depend on the stripe size, how the data is written, and the number of multiple reads of those (possibly split) files from each disk.

 

Unfortunately, Reid 0 does not solve the weakness a single XT - 4Gb to remain still a bottleneck

 

??? Bottleneck to what? Price - performance still makes the 4GB XT a nice alternative to full blown SSD, and the 2nd Gen model even more attractive. In this thread or the XT 2nd Gen thread, I thought Tiller (or someone else) has some benchmarks. Not too much a bottleneck when compared against platform based HDD.

 

My XT 500GB - 17 months, normal flight
money spent fully justified

but because of the 4GB I decided to buy SSD and not the second XT in RAID 0
(you use XT in RAID1, that makes sense)

 

Hi tilleroftheearth,

Which revisions are you comparing?

Also, is there a test showing these results?

Thank you

 

I have both the 4GB nand version 500GB drive with firmware SD28 installed and the new 8GB nand version 750GB drive with the originally shipped firmware.

I don't have specific tests in RAID0, but these results speak for themselves:

See:
AnandTech - Seagate 2nd Generation Momentus XT (750GB) Hybrid HDD Review

See:
Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid Hard Drive Review

 

From the very beginning I wanted to buy one more Seagate XT in raid
...to be honest, I do regret that I bought the SSD
tests in RAID0

 

I'd rather have two hybrids in RAID for a full terabyte of data than a SSD + HDD.

I only have one dock so it doesn't really matter anyways! lol

 

I'm sure it's been asked before in here somewhere, but is there any special process to migrate from a normal 500gb hdd to a momentus xt? Trying to clone everything on the drive, partitions, windows, data, everything.

 

Clone like you would any other drive.

 

Anyone bought and using the 750g XT on the forums?

 

Yes. Some of them have posted here - http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...eagate-momentus-xt-750gb-w-8gb-nand-more.html

 

I have a 320GB Momentus XT in my notebook, and just noticed that Windows 7 Computer Management and DISKPART both show it with 298GB capacity. There is no unallocated space shown.

I do have a hidden 20GB "recovery partition," but I added up the size of the partitions shown by Win7, and it equals 298 including that partition.

Any ideas on my "missing" 22GB? It seems too much to attribute to the 1024 v 1000 practice for defining "mega-".

 

It isn't too much, it is just right. (1000/1024)^3 = 0.93, 0.93*320 = 298

 

I did the 1024 vs 1000 calculation and 320GB with 1k=1000 gives 298GB with 1k=1024 so your 298GB capacity is correct.

 

Darn. I forgot to do it to a factor of 3! Thanks for the quick replies!

 

About how many time do I need to repeat an action (ie, restarting windows, opening ff, opening steam) for the nand to kick in and cache the actions?

I think my drive is a little confused because of the way I tend to use it (randomly), I am not really seeing a performance boost over a normal 7200rpm drive. I've restarted windows a good 20 times or so over the past 10 days, but it still boots up reading off the platters (can hear them spinning when windows is loading, takes the same amount of time as an hdd boot).

Strangely enough chrome seems to have been stored in the cache right away - it starts up in a blink, even though I only use it half as often as ff. What can I do to uh... optimize... the cache? Do I just keep restarting over and over?

 

I have a laptop with 2 bays. For best performance, should I use a Momentus XT or a ssd for OS and a 5400rpm hdd for storage ?

 

Correct, use the 5400RPM for storage.

 

Hello all, just got the XT 500 gigs and it came with the SD26 firmware on it.

Was trying to upgrade to the SD28 using the seagate utility software but it keeps failing. Doesnt even detects the hard drive during the scanning part.

My guess is its the way its connected to my laptop

Dv7-6165us which has 2 hard drive slots but im only using one at the moment untill i get a hard drive kit from hp to install the older hard drive back .

So maybe i try the other SATA port then? if so. that should affect booting back into windows or anything right.

 

Hey. I just found this, if anyone is interested:

Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

$129.99

$30 off with coupon code EMCNHHB38 -- sale ends 3/5

Disclaimer: No, I'm not affiliated with Newegg...just seems like a good enough deal to share with others. And I realize that at one point, these drives were going for $90 apiece...until the flooding in Asia. My understanding is that $100 is pretty good, considering the prices spiked to $140-150.

 

For those pondering getting the new 8gb Nano I had a 320 gb 4 gb nano first then upgraded to the 750gb 8gb nano and found it not any faster for my needs. The 4 gb nano worked excellant.

 

I got the momentus xt 500gb and i have the following issue:

When i move my laptop around i hear a faint buzzing noise (like a cpu fan getting out of balance?) but it is clearly my momentus xt.

I did a read test and moved the laptop around, you can see a clear drop of read speed (kb/s) while i tilt the laptop, it immediately continues after the tilt and the buzz-sound but is this normal for 7600rpm harddisks?

Never experienced this with my previous 5400 WD Blue...

 

What is your type of SATA port? SATA II or SATA III?

 

how to partition my momentus hybrid.....any1 can teach me?i already install my os...can i do a partition after os installation?

 

Yes, with EASEUS Partition Master.

 

is that a software?

 

You can use window's built in disk management tool.

Here's a video that should answer all your questions: How to partition a hard drive on Windows 7 - YouTube.

 

I have the 500gb xt with 4gb ssd. I did not notice any difference in speed. Waste of money for me. I will be looking to get a full SSD on my next laptop.

 

The noise has been covered many times in past post. This is a hard drive, not an SSD. If you keep banging the thing around you may have a head crash, as in any spinner, if you exceed a certain g force.

That said, mine makes that sound, if i'm rough with it..so I don't. I have had great use in almost 2 years of service, with 3 years left for the SSD to come down further in prices I have two wd blues collecting dust but serve in external cases now.