Seagate Momentus XT Problems

tjb1 said:

Its not a SSD, it doesn't load everything from flash...it loads the most used items and that takes a while to establish with the drive. Instead of complaining about it maybe you should have talked to Seagate to get it replaced.

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I'm not sure where in my statement I said I expected it to perform like an SSD. I fully understand how the drive works. For me, the performance gains simply don't outweigh the noise and vibration when compared against the stock 7200 RPM drive. As far as getting it replaced, there's nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't perform.

You seem personally offended that I didn't like the drive, which I find odd. I'm not the only one who doesn't like it. Get over it.

Celeron said:

I'm not sure where in my statement I said I expected it to perform like an SSD. I fully understand how the drive works. For me, the performance gains simply don't outweigh the noise and vibration when compared against the stock 7200 RPM drive. As far as getting it replaced, there's nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't perform.

You seem personally offended that I didn't like the drive, which I find odd. I'm not the only one who doesn't like it. Get over it.

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No im tired of people providing false information, how could another 7200 rpm drive has vibrations and noise more than another 7200 rpm drive if nothing is wrong with it? Obviously something is wrong with it and its not going to be much faster, it has a 4gb cache. There is nothing wrong with the drives, call and have yours replaced if you have that much of a problem with a little vibration.

tjb1 said:

No im tired of people providing false information, how could another 7200 rpm drive has vibrations and noise more than another 7200 rpm drive if nothing is wrong with it? Obviously something is wrong with it and its not going to be much faster, it has a 4gb cache. There is nothing wrong with the drives, call and have yours replaced if you have that much of a problem with a little vibration.

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Are you seriously trying to make the claim that all 7200 RPMs hard drives have the exact same acoustic properties? Seriously? Man, you must be on to something, I should call Seagate and have them replace it ASAP!

Sorry if it upsets you that some people have a different opinion of this drive. However, that doesn't make myself, or anyone else, a liar as you're insinuating with your "false information" claim. I didn't think there was such a thing as hard drive fanboys, but here we are.

At the end of the day I didn't like the drive. Originally I did. After a month I didn't, for the reasons I mentioned. I'll say it again, get over it.

Celeron said:

Are you seriously trying to make the claim that all 7200 RPMs hard drives have the exact same acoustic properties? Seriously? Man, you must be on to something, I should call Seagate and have them replace it ASAP!

Sorry if it upsets you that some people have a different opinion of this drive. However, that doesn't make myself, or anyone else, a liar as you're insinuating with your "false information" claim. I didn't think there was such a thing as hard drive fanboys, but here we are.

At the end of the day I didn't like the drive. Originally I did. After a month I didn't, for the reasons I mentioned. I'll say it again, get over it.

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Two Momentus drives made by the same manufacturer and the only difference is a 4gb flash cache. No, I am not a fanboy...I am tired of people like you that hear a little whur and complain about noise or a little vibration. Turn some music on and get over it, there are platters spinning at 7200rpm of course it is going to make noise. If this drive is so bad because 20 people on this forum say so, I guess the Macbook Pro is giant piece of crap because we get 1000's of post about it breaking, bad software, junk, crap, etc.

There must be something wrong with that drive, because I upgraded from the standard 5400 RPM Hitachi drive that comes with the MBP, which is an extremely quiet drive with no vibration, and I honestly can't feel any vibration or hear any noise from this Momentus XT. It's slightly louder if I hold my ear right next to my laptop, obviously, as it's spinning faster, but definitely nothing to write home about...

Momentus XT 500GB

I have just finished cloning my stock MBP drive onto the momentus xt after five frustrating days... and I'm still not convinced I'm in the clear with this POS. I also have a bootcamp partition which already blue screened twice after having it installed for less than an hour. It is a totally unstable drive and I will return it.

BTW, anyone that had success with this drive, good for you, but don't be surprised if one day it doesn't boot or your data gets corrupted. With this drive it's seems to be some subtle issue that you may not notice for a while based on your hardware setup.

And also, firmware SD25 is already out which I upgraded to. Clearly there is some major issue they are trying to address. Notice they failed to provide any release notes for the last two firmware releases, hmmmm.

current firmware= SD25

phantomkingx said:

Momentus XT 500GB

I have just finished cloning my stock MBP drive onto the momentus xt after five frustrating days... and I'm still not convinced I'm in the clear with this POS. I also have a bootcamp partition which already blue screened twice after having it installed for less than an hour. It is a totally unstable drive and I will return it.

BTW, anyone that had success with this drive, good for you, but don't be surprised if one day it doesn't boot or your data gets corrupted. With this drive it's seems to be some subtle issue that you may not notice for a while based on your hardware setup.

And also, firmware SD25 is already out which I upgraded to. Clearly there is some major issue they are trying to address. Notice they failed to provide any release notes for the last two firmware releases, hmmmm.

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Did you reset your PRAM after installing the drive. I have had nothing but great gains in performance with this drive.

I upgraded my XT to SD24 when I had bought it. Now that SD25 is out if I upgrade the drive will it reformat the information on it? Whatever the answer is it then worth it to upgrade?

(Note: I have had no detectable problems with this drive.)

Tabris82 said:

I upgraded my XT to SD24 when I had bought it. Now that SD25 is out if I upgrade the drive will it reformat the information on it? Whatever the answer is it then worth it to upgrade?

(Note: I have had no detectable problems with this drive.)

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No, it will not reformat. In my opinion the upgrade is worth it.

So far so good for me, boots in about 18 to 20 seconds. My only minor complaint is it seems to kill my battery faster

lavrishevo said:

Did you reset your PRAM after installing the drive. I have had nothing but great gains in performance with this drive.

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PRAM has nothing to do with the issues experienced with this drive. I had tried a fresh install from a retail version of snow leopard and it failed during the install. Absolutely nothing to do with PRAM.

Here you go SD26 already in the works, nothing but issues:

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Moment...EAD-Momentus-XT-spreadsheet/td-p/99676/page/2

and here is a link to another thread if you question the disaster this drive is:

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Moment...ms-with-Momentus-XT-please-come-in/td-p/59455

phantomkingx said:

PRAM has nothing to do with the issues experienced with this drive. I had tried a fresh install from a retail version of snow leopard and it failed during the install. Absolutely nothing to do with PRAM.

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PRAM resets:


Status of AppleTalk
Serial Port Configuration and Port definition
Alarm clock setting
Application font
Serial printer location
Autokey rate
Autokey delay
Speaker volume
Attention (beep) sound
Double-click time
Caret blink time (insertion point rate)
Mouse scaling (mouse speed)
Startup disk
Menu blink count
Monitor depth
32-bit addressing
Virtual memory
RAM disk
Disk cache


I was having an issue with a very long boot after installation of my XT and the PRAM reset fixed it immediately. It has helped others as well. Believe what you want but it is worth a try.

lavrishevo said:

PRAM resets:


Status of AppleTalk
Serial Port Configuration and Port definition
Alarm clock setting
Application font
Serial printer location
Autokey rate
Autokey delay
Speaker volume
Attention (beep) sound
Double-click time
Caret blink time (insertion point rate)
Mouse scaling (mouse speed)
Startup disk
Menu blink count
Monitor depth
32-bit addressing
Virtual memory
RAM disk
Disk cache


I was having an issue with a very long boot after installation of my XT and the PRAM reset fixed it immediately. It has helped others as well. Believe what you want but it is worth a try.

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Again the PRAM reset is independent of the drive issues. Yes, this may help boot times but it's not Momentus XT specific, and it will not fix the crashes the drive itself causes. Read the links I posted above. The issues require workarounds / configuration changes either to the drive or the system. i.e. downgrading EFI, reverting to SATA1, etc. This is not acceptable! So until this drive is fixed people should not take the risk with it.

I bought a Momentus XT 500GB three weeks ago for my early-2010 MBP, which has the 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo and 8GB of RAM. I needed more space and hoped for more speed vs. the standard drive, which spun at 5400 rpm. And I liked the concept: an intelligent drive which detects the most-frequently-loaded data and automatically stores it in a dedicated flash RAM cache for quick retrieval. Nice idea.

I was concerned about the many negative posts about this drive but hoped they represented issues with earlier firmware vs. the SD25 firmware, which was recently released.

So I bought the drive, installed it, immediately flashed it to SD25 (it came with SD24), and restored from my Time Machine backup.

It works pretty well, but I've found hibernation to be hit-or-miss, and my biggest problem has been battery life. It is reduced by 30-50%. I barely get two hours out of my MBP now, and it runs hot.

I'll get a Scorpio Black tomorrow and will return the Momentus XT (after wiping it, of course) for a refund if I can. It's a nice concept, but clearly they haven't figured out how to do things power-efficiently or reliably.

I also don't much approve of Seagate's pronouncements on the topic, which have either denied there are problems or impugned Apple for failing to provide sufficient engineering resources to make the drive work. If it's somehow Apple's fault, why are the Momentus XT forums filled with rage from Windows users too? Not classy, Seagate.

tjb1 said:

Two Momentus drives made by the same manufacturer and the only difference is a 4gb flash cache.

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A bit glib today are we? That little difference is accompanied by some very sophisticated logic that detects most-loaded data and tucks it away in flash, then intercepting OS calls for this-data-from-that-sector to substitute it from flash instead.

In other words, that "little difference" includes a very deep, profoundly complicated piece of logic through which all your code and data must pass. It's mission-critical, and many folks are having trouble (and not just on Macs).

For me, as I posted, the big issue is the drive's horrendous power consumption. I've gone from 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm before and am well aware there's a hit, but it's always been minor for me, especially on the Mac where power management has been honed to such a sharp edge. The Momentus XT is simply gluttonous for power, and that's earning it a return tomorrow from me.

That was 3 months ago.

Well, all I can say is the drive is performing excellent in my quad core. If it changes I will have no qualms about proclaiming it on this forum but the performance increase over the stock 5400 is significant.

Maybe I spoke too soon about the drive working great. As of yesterday I can't shut down or restart OSX without holding down the power button. I've waited up to 15 minutes hoping it would shut down on it's own without having to do that.

Last night i did a verify disk in disk utility and had to repair the HDD with the installation disk. It said the disk was repaired but I still can not shut down.

When I installed the new drive I reinstalled OSX from a DMG of my previous disk using Carbon Copy Cloner, would this have anything to do with this? Everything was fine for 1 week and then this... should I reinstall OSX?

I'm starting to get very irritated

My momentus xt was fine with firmware sd24 (at least so i thought) but with sd25, the drive would emit loud beeping noises in osx (and not in bootcamp--weird). Having searched around the seagate forums, I learned it was a common problem, and a bit disconcerting, so I returned it. If you'd like I'll provide links, but I'm a bit lazy atm

Maybe Seagate has some serious quality control issues. These problems are not universal and many people have great experiences with them. When I purchased my drive it came with sd23. I cloned my stock drive to the Momentus XT then upgraded the firmware to sd25 via the boot disk utility and have been very impressed with the speed increase.

Anyway, it's a shame to hear about the problems others are having.

From what I've read, the problems users have with the drive are so hard to reproduce in a consistent manner that the engineers are having a hard time isolating the issue.

That makes me think that either:
1. Seagate testing environments are mostly Windows based, as most problems reported with the drive are with OS X users, or
2. their QC is kind of weak.

To corroborate #2, I purchased a normal 7200RPM drive (from Seagate as well) before I learned of the magic of SSD, and the first drive I received would vibrate pretty violently, whereas the replacement they sent me had no such issues.

My update and potential workaround

BTW, my rig is a mid 2009 15'' MBP

I tried one last thing to get my drive working by forcing SATA1 mode using jumper settings, here's the diagram:

http://www.seagate.com/images/support/en/us/cuda_sata_block.gif

What you compromise in doing this, down from 3.0 to 1.5 Gb/s transfer rate (may affect cache performance) and no NCQ (probably what causes issues with this drive, though NCQ is supposed to improve drive performance).

I yet again repartitioned the drive restored my time machine backup and windows 7 bootcamp image. I have to say the process seemed flawless this time, i.e no warning symbols on osx boot, hangs, or crashes, and windows 7 working fine also. Drive working as expected... so far. I'm hoping it stays in this stable state with a workaround I am willing to live with since performance feels excellent, and I don't want to go through process of returning the drive and buying another.

Just to be clear, I am not endorsing this drive. I am justing posting what worked for me to help anyone else stuck with this lemon. Seagate needs to fix this thing first so people don't waste their time with it or end up with a worthless piece of junk, DO NOT BUY if you haven't already.

I had the Momentus XT in my "cart" on a few occasions and glad I never pulled the trigger. I think I am going to keep my late 09 MBP 13" for a bit longer and just get the Scorpio Black 750GB to tide me over until I buy a new Mac in the near future. I need the room more than anything.