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

Yes, old good software, but no need as per tijo. Use W7 tools but you may want to read up on the procedures and back up ur good stuff just in case.

Here one of many to help you;

Disk Management Windows 7 - How To Access Disk Management in Windows 7

 

I just had one momentus xt in my lap which has only one hDD bay. I'm in love. Threw my low capacity ssds at garbarge. Computer starts within 30 secs, 500GB of pure happiness.

I had a clicking noise due to this damn useless APM thing but solved it and now the HDD is silent.

 

anyone know why windows see's it as 5.9 ? surely it should be higher

 

This drive truly shows its colors with files that end up cached in the SSD portion. The Windows Experience Index won't cache files in the SSD, so it won't reflect the true read performance of the drive.

 

This, i suppose that if you were to run the benchmark multiple times it might get moved to the cache, but then that would mean moving other more important data out of the SSD cache.

 

I don't believe that is the case.

A benchmark is going to generate and write data to the drive, read it, and then delete it upon completion. <strike>A cache like that</strike>For a bench like that, the drive would not be able to cache the data as the bench generates a set of different files for each individual run.

 

You're right, how didn't i think of that.

 

Windows benchmark != typical benchmark. You can ignore it.

 

is there any firmware updates for the 750gb xt hybrid? i'm about to grab a pair and see what the fuss is all about. i crave ssd boot times.

 

I want to put the OS on a SSD, but keep the XT for storage. Will I longer benefit the 4 giga SSD of the XT ? Or it will behave like a regular 7200rpm hdd ?
PS: If it will behave like a regular 7200rpm hdd, then I put a 5400rpm hdd instead.

 

From Seagate's web site, it still looks like SD28 is the latest version. However, to be a little blunt, if you want SSD boot times, you may want to consider an SSD, as some prices are now less than $1/GB.

The answer for this depends on what you will use the drive for. I for instance, have about 125GB of libraries for images, music, software, and read-only virtual machines. I'm using the Momentus XT to server those files, and for most often used files, the SSD vastly outperforms the older drive (and slower) where these things used to reside. The XT is more than happy to work in this scenario.

However, if you are going to use the drive where you mostly do writes (video editing, copying files to the drive, etc.) The XT will behave just about the same as a WD Scorpio Black.

Also note, it has bee suggested by Seagate that this summer there will be a [FW] update for the 2nd Gen drive that will start caching WRITES to the SSD portion as well. Dunno what that will mean for overall performance, but if it does come out, a lot of us are waiting to see what exactly that means for WRITE performance of the drive.

 

i just installed the xt drives. boot times rival that of ssd toe to toe. about a second or two slower. it takes 3 minutes to boot with my 7200rpm 750gb drives and 30 seconds with the xt 750!

edit; with over 100 procesess that is.

 

Exactly. The XT is just a tad off of SSD boot times. However, you said you craved SSD boot times, and if you really, really wanted those SSD boot times, you would need to just get an SSD as the XT will be slower. But then again, we're only talking a couple of seconds here.

 

600gb ssd drive that boots in 28 seconds from windows start screen = $1,000

750gb hybrid that boots in 30 seconds from windows start screen = $200

 

Why would you buy a $1000 SSD, when you can get a really good 256 GB SSD for < $200 (Crucial M4)?

256GB SSD boot in 28 seconds = $199 USD
750GB XT boot in 30 seconds = $150 USD

If you need the drive space or are looking for a better $$/GB ratio, that is one thing, but in your post, you were craving "ssd boot times."

 

Only a 2 second difference? Damn!

What about launching of other apps.. Frequently opening Windows Explorer etc?

 

If an app ends up in the 8GB SSD portion, times lags just a bit behind the SSD as well.

My experience has been close to what these videos show -

Seagate Momentus XT - YouTube
Momentus XT 750 Vs. SSD .mov - YouTube

 

How have people's long term reliability been with this drive? I have one of the original 500gb XT drives from mid-2010 when they came out (IIRC).

It failed about 1 year in, sent it back to Seagate and received a "new" or "refurbed" drive in return.

That one just failed this past Sunday. So I'm RMA'ing it again back to Seagate.

I don't consider myself a power user, and keep my drives/computers in pretty darn good condition with little abuse, keep the crap that's loaded on them to a minimum, etc. Use the laptop maybe a couple of hours a week.

So somewhat dismayed with the reliability thus far and debating whether I should bother reinstalling this drive when I get it back. I know all brands fail, but twice in 2 years?

On the bright side, I literally have been backing up my data much more often, and thankfully had just backed it up days before the thing failed.

 

The 750 GB XT is, for all intents and purposes, the perfect upgrade for a dual-boot MacBook Pro. SSD is not optimal in terms of capacity, given how much 500+ GB drives cost. It's also not ideal because TRIM is not supported on OS X without an official Apple drive or hacking the OS. Further, Boot Camp installs Windows in IDE mode, rather than AHCI. Again, it's possible to hack the OS but it's a time-consuming process that might not necessarily work. Doing optibay with a MBP is possible, but in order to install Windows on many models you have to use the Superdrive connected internally.

 

Sorry to hear that. Only thing I can say, is I'm at 23 months and still running strong on my RAID-1 volume of XTs.

 

With the new XT drives for the Seagate 500GB hybrid drive, how much of a difference would it make upgrading from a 750GB 7200RPM hard drive? And would it even affect gaming, or only boot times?

 

From my understanding, it may improve games' load times as well as boot times.

 

In regards to XT (BTW, consider the 2nd Gen XT 2/ 8GB SSD):

a) If you install an operating system on it, it will drastically increase boot times.
b) If you use applications that are "bottlenecked" by disk I/O from static data within files, it will increase access time on the most frequently accessed files (up to the point it fills up the SSD cache).

Since most of today's games are mostly bottlenecked by GPU, it will speed up the "starting" of your game and maybe some animation/cut scenes (as those files may be read from the SSD portion of the XT), but won't really do too much in terms of game play as those are more GPU (and CPU to a lesser degree) intensive.

HTH

 

Ehh, I guess I'll pass on the hybrid drive. While faster load times and boot times would be nice, I don't think they're worth $40 to me. And I wouldn't get the 8GB hybrid drive because it costs more money than I'm willing to spend on the upgrade. Thanks for the answers

 

I bought a used 500XT for my son's laptop and he churns away with it and so far so good. Messed around recently with his laptop and it is much faster than my standard HD unit even though mine is an I7 while his is a I5 processor laptop.

 

I saw some tests stating that a ssd could improve a little the minimum frame rate. But marginally. Momentus XT won't do that i think. It's more about incresing boot times and frequently used softwares access.

I have one. I love it. I don't regret my 60gb ssd at all.

 

Well, hopefully third one is a charm. Just got notification it is shipping back to me.

BTW, is it recco'd to install Windows on this drive in ACHI mode (like SSD's) or IDE?

 

If your laptop's BIOS has AHCI, then use it. It is a faster interface for ALL SATA devices, not just SSDs.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/596731-momentus-xt-should-ahci-enabled.html

 

Hello,

I have a Seagate Momentus XT 500Gb since ~1.5y on my Thinkpad T61.
Since a few months, I get lots of "micro freezes"... kinda like lots of people with a Momentus XT.

I did several HD Tune benchmarks and the results are really weird.
It caps at ~85mo/s and there are a lot of down spikes on the graph: the HDD goes down at around 5mo/s for a second a so, several times during the benchmark.

The particular thing is when I connect my HDD on another computer and do the benchmark, it is totally normal: it caps at ~105mo/s for an average read of 80mo/s, and there are no spike at all. All like on day one on my laptop.
Also, no matter if it is on my laptop or my other computer, the Seagate diagnostic tools says the drive has no error. HD Tune however shows that there is one too many End-to-End error...

I did a full erase on the disk, updated the disk firmware, updated and set back to defaults the laptop BIOS... and no luck.

What do you people think?

Thanks

 

I just wanted to chime in and say that I have this drive and I recently upgraded the firmware to SD28 and wow things sure do seem faster!

 

Is there a new firmware update for the XT drives?

 

SD28 was the last XT Momentus [FW].

 

Hello, I recently bought this Seagate.
My temperatures are around 45-50 celcius. Is this normal? Is it too much, in the manual it says it operates to 60 degree but 50 seems very hot.
My other HDD is only 35-40 degree maximum.

Thank you.

 

Normal, just slightly warm, mine is sitting at 44 idling, and maximum during its life was 53.


So by the way, didn't Seagate promise there would be a write caching enabling firmware update early this year? It never came out, the 750gb still has the same current firmware as it launched with. I contacted seagate support but they responded with something useless about where to find the last firmware, and I tried signing up for their forums but the registration has weird bugs. Anyone know? Did they cancel that plan and decide to never talk about it again?

 

stelxz, it's not the HDD that is 'too hot' - it is the notebook drive bay it is placed in.

What system are you using it in? And which drive bay (primary, secondary or OD location)?

 

I have sager np8150, the hot HDD is in the primary bay, the normal HDD is in the optical drive bay.

 

So, a 15.6" notebook with a high-end discrete GPU... I bet the GPU is next to the HDD right?

It's not this hot when the system is just sitting idle? If so; maybe time to clean out the vents/fans and/or even re-apply a fresh TIM?

 

Yeah, I thought it can be hotter because the notebook is only 15 inches.
My GPU temp in idle is around 60 degree and my Seagate is around 44.
I will try cleaning I bit but I guess the temperatures are not so high and is normal for the small notebook and the GPU heating contribution.

 

So, anyone know about that write caching firmware update they promised?

 

I read a huge coperate studdy in to hdd failures and they said that hdd temprature caused very few failures.

John.

 

What is the consensus on the XT drives from all you who've been writing about it for so long, on the subject of downloading and torrenting? Do the incomplete files tire out the SSD section of the drive, or do they skip straight to the HDD section, and if we place the downloads in another drive will we also have to make sure the temporal files aren't in the hybrid's drive by seeing to that, somehow, the temp folder associated to the torrenting isn't in the default drive_?

 

If you're using the files in a non-library situation, you won't see much benefit from an XT. As the newer generations being 5400 RPM based drives, you're probably better served with a 7200 RPM HDD or an SSD. In regards to writes done to the drive for normal files, those always go to the platters, they do not end up in the SSD portion of the drive until a particular LBA is read over a number of times. Same would go with temp files, unless temp files are read enough times to knock out other commonly read LBAs from the drive, it won't make a difference.

Now, if you have a library of files (.libs, .dlls, music, video, pix, or whatever) you use over and over and over, the XT really shines when it comes to reading those off disk.

 

Where the XT will shine as a storage device is where you have a lot of metadata loaded. Such as the file explorer constantly accessing directories and thumbnails etc. These get built to the drive and as small files are constantly being accessed as you browse the disc. The XT's will store these into NAND pretty rapidly and make the drive feel lively.

Now as a storage device just for archive the XT may not be worth it........................