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Momentus XT - STAY AWAY!

oplix

oplix

Suspended
Original poster
Like most of the other people who have ordered one, I too was excited for the time that the drive worked. However, my first drive failed in a month and a half. I paid Seagate for a advance replacement. The replacement failed in THREE DAYS. No you are not seeing things, I said three days. For something with a five year warranty it is absolutely absurd.

These drives were rushed into production without properly being tested on a variety of machines. Just go browse some of IBM Lenovo forums.

STAY AWAY FROM THIS DRIVE.

You have been warned.
 
Uh oh, just installed this drive last week.

I hope it lasts at least for 2 more weeks - I'll be traveling and won't be able to backup until then...
 
oplix said:
Like most of the other people who have ordered one, I too was excited for the time that the drive worked. However, my first drive failed in a month and a half. I paid Seagate for a advance replacement. The replacement failed in THREE DAYS. No you are not seeing things, I said three days. For something with a five year warranty it is absolutely absurd.

These drives were rushed into production without properly being tested on a variety of machines. Just go browse some of IBM Lenovo forums.

STAY AWAY FROM THIS DRIVE.

You have been warned.
Click to expand...
It's a regular 7200RPM Seagate drive. Even the logic board is the same as the regular 7200RPM one, except is has a 4GB of flash on it. Maybe you were just SOL? Did you update the firmware to the latest version?

Also, you get your drive replaced for the next 5 years until it works. What has that to do with how long it takes to fail?

Well, get a G.Skill Phoenix Pro 120GB/240GB if you're tired of (failing) hard drives and the space is enough for you. Else, nothing left but WD Scorpio Black - or waiting until WD produces hybrid drives.
 
What ends up happening before it's about to take a **** is that you will notice it hang/lag coming out of sleep and eventually running Disk Utility will highlight the drive in RED and it will say something like "There has been a hardware problem, backup your data, and replace the drive".

S.M.A.R.T. status will show as Failing.
 
As I told you, update the firmware before using it. The drives aren't actually failing this fast, this is rather a software bug.
 
Does anyone know what the latest firmware update actually addresses?

I read a bit on Seagate's site but couldn't find specific information on what the firmware update does.

Hesitant to upgrade mine since I don't have any issues.
 
A lot of drama in your post. Seagate has a history of releasing defective drives. The Momentus XT is a newer technology, so you are bound to find more than normal defects as the kinks are worked out. That being said, if you're going to buy new tech, then be prepared for problems. But what does it matter, you have a warranty so you're protected. Just do nightly backups and get on with your life. Meh.
 
martinmartin said:
Does anyone know what the latest firmware update actually addresses?

I read a bit on Seagate's site but couldn't find specific information on what the firmware update does.

Hesitant to upgrade mine since I don't have any issues.
Click to expand...

I believe the firmware was to keep the drive from spinning down even when it's not accessing data and just pulling from the SSD portion of the drive. It was designed to spin down to save energy. The firmware is supposed to keep that from happening, but at the sacrifice of shortened battery. I read in another thread that by having the drive always spinning you lose about an hour or so of battery life. But if you leave your laptop always plugged in, I suppose that's not a problem.
 
THX1139 said:
I believe the firmware was to keep the drive from spinning down even when it's not accessing data and just pulling from the SSD portion of the drive. It was designed to spin down to save energy. The firmware is supposed to keep that from happening, but at the sacrifice of shortened battery. I read in another thread that by having the drive always spinning you lose about an hour or so of battery life. But if you leave your laptop always plugged in, I suppose that's not a problem.
Click to expand...

But there goes one of the two reasons to buy a hybrid drive. You would hope that a hybrid drive where the SSD is just a cache would cache important things like directories, so when I save a file the directories are already in the cache, and the new file is written to the cache as well without spinning up your hard drive, and only copied to the hard drive when it is spinning anyway.

It is sad when you think how much unimaginable engineering prowess goes into these drives, and then they fail because they can't find anyone or can't be bothered to write some really good software for it.


THX1139 said:
A lot of drama in your post. Seagate has a history of releasing defective drives. The Momentus XT is a newer technology, so you are bound to find more than normal defects as the kinks are worked out. That being said, if you're going to buy new tech, then be prepared for problems. But what does it matter, you have a warranty so you're protected. Just do nightly backups and get on with your life. Meh.
Click to expand...

I just hope that buy the time I'm going to upgrade my MBP's hard drive, they have a 1 TB drive with a decent sized SSD cache (say 16 GB, that should cover a lot of disk activity), with decent software at a decent price.
 
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