2TB Seagate M9T 9.5mm thick drives

[g4cube]

The USB version identifies the drive as ST2000LM005

The SATA version identifies the drive as ST2000LM003

So...you can use to Disk Utility or visual inspection way to identify the drive.

 

[Tobias Funke]

Just to confirm it is the ST2000LM003 inside the STDR2000201.

It is very easy to open.

It is VERY quiet.

A LOT quieter than the HGST 1.5TB I have replaced it with.

It has connected at SATA3 speeds.

No problems so far.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Argos price has dropped to £89.99....still available in my local Argos this week.

You can now get two M9Ts in the Seagate Backup Plus fast portable 4Tb. I have just bought one. Maplins are stocking them.

Amazingly compact for a bus powered 4Tb device....much smaller than the WD 4Tb Thunderbolt device.

 

[Tobias Funke]

Does any body know what the foil is for??

Is it for heat or sound deadening??

 

[pghdjspaz]

Argos price has dropped to £89.99....still available in my local Argos this week.

You can now get two M9Ts in the Seagate Backup Plus fast portable 4Tb. I have just bought one. Maplins are stocking them.

Amazingly compact for a bus powered 4Tb device....much smaller than the WD 4Tb Thunderbolt device.

Do you know if these are the SATA ones or are they the ones with the USB soldered directly to the boards? I would assume they are SATA since they are stacked but I want to be totally sure before buying.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Do you know if these are the SATA ones or are they the ones with the USB soldered directly to the boards? I would assume they are SATA since they are stacked but I want to be totally sure before buying.

This link says categorically that the 4Tb Fast backup plus model does have two standard SATA M9Ts.

I didn't buy mine to strip out the M9Ts so I won't be able to confirm. But if you want to strip out the M9T it is is cheaper to buy the single drive for £89.99, than the RAID version for £249 (though I have seen it a lot cheaper since)

 

[pghdjspaz]

This link says categorically that the 4Tb Fast backup plus model does have two standard SATA M9Ts.

I didn't buy mine to strip out the M9Ts so I won't be able to confirm. But if you want to strip out the M9T it is is cheaper to buy the single drive for £89.99, than the RAID version for £249 (though I have seen it a lot cheaper since)

I'd buy the drive but I'm in the states and no one seems to carry it yet.

 

[tallpaul]

hi,

I've been away so only saw your question now, I put two 2tb samsung M9t into my mac mini, works superb as a media centre.

Justo update you on how my 2011 MBP 13 is going.

I have the 2TB m9t in since Jan 14 I think works perfect, super silent, tons of space, can't fault it.

I just put in a new battery, perfect laptop with 256SSD main drive and 8Gb of ram, all that's left is to get 16Gb but prob not needed!!

Is there anyone else except paul who has had perfect success with this drive (samsung/seagate M9T) in a mac? Please report back which model if so, and anything you had to do to get it working. Thanks!

 

[dreamcat4]

If anyone here owns one of these drives (seagate / samsung m9t), can you please post the smartctl output of it? Many thanks.

Install smartctl utility from mac homebrew with
'brew install smartmontools'

then type
'smartctl -s on --xall /dev/diskX'
(you may need to be root or an administrator/wheel user to read the hdd infos)

[EDIT]
specifically, we are interested in how fast the smart parameter 'load_cycle_count' is increasing by. It is a sign of head parking. Also (if on a desktop, not a laptop), it should be possible to disable head parking by setting the S.M.A.R.T. APM power management state to 254 the lowest 'always on' power saving / least aggressive mode. It would be nice to know if that APM power mode is remembered persistently across reboots / power cycles. As unfortunately that is not the case with other Seagate drives. Thanks again.

[EDIT2]
To set the apm level to max 254 (to disable head parking and extend the lifetime of the drive) requires the hdapm tool. It can be downloaded here: http://mckinlay.net.nz/hdapm/

To get full information, including to print the current APM level, requires the --xall option. Like this:
'smartctl -s on --xall /dev/diskX'

 

[simonsi]

Why would disabling head parking extend the life of the device? This is a laptop and it will need to be able to park the heads to prevent damage and extend the battery life.

 

[dreamcat4]

This is a laptop

Not everybody uses 2.5" HDDs for a laptop. Like the guy in previous post before mine who has two of these drives in his Mac Mini. ^^

You are correct in saying that laptop users should not want to disable or increase the head parking timeout. But for other users this can be highly desirable feature.

On a desktop machine with no battery then there is going to be few benefit to be saving the 2 watts going to sleep all the time. Not that the power saving will even be so much as that if the drive is continuously being woken up again.

For example, did you know that on FreeBSD+ZFS, the short timeout actually interferes with ZFS's read-ahead memory cacheing mechanism, (which reads just slightly less often, e.g. every 10-15 seconds). Thereby causing a continuous cycle of idle --> park --> request next chunk --> wake up --> unpark --> read --> idle --> park.

The problem is not just restricted to freebsd + zfs or server type loads. You would be surprised how easily this situation can happen on a desktop machine. Many other kinds of background software can request access to the disk very often and will thereby also cause this same effect.

Now. These sorts of drives are typically rated for 600,000 load_cycle_count. But you would be surprised how quickly that number can be reached. In fact on my OS X machine i've been using a 750GB Seagate 7200.4 in my Mac Mini for power_on_hours = 12126 /24 = 505 days. In that time smartctl is reporting the load_cycle_count to be 189,9918 already. And that's when it's never even been my primary drive, just using it for a secondary mass storage device and a few big things like my iTunes Library.

----------

I put two 2tb samsung M9t into my mac mini,

Hi tallpaul. If you are still here can you please run smartctl ,etc and post output as described above? Many thanks.

 

[simonsi]

Not everybody uses 2.5" HDDs for a laptop.

Ah, clearly we have drifted away from discussing MBPs, my bad.

 

[ramasnami]

If anyone here owns one of these drives (seagate / samsung m9t), can you please post the smartctl output of it? Many thanks.'

I am using two M9T HDDs in my Mac Mini 2012. Here is my SMART report (not from smartctl but all parameters here)

Spoiler: S.M.A.R.T. report

### SYSTEM INFORMATION ###

Report Timestamp : 29 Oct 2015 02:24:03 EET

Report Timestamp (ISO 8601 format) : 2015-10-29T02:24:03



Application Name : DriveDx

Application Version : 1.4.1.490

App SubBuild : 0

Application Edition : 1

DriveDx Knowledge Base Revision : 3/3



Computer Name : MiniServer

Host Name : MiniServer

Computer Model : Macmini6,1



OS Boot Time : 2015-10-25T01:01:27

Time Since Boot : 4 days 02h 22m 36s

OS Name : Mac OS X

OS Version : 10.10.5

OS Build : 14F27

OS Kernel Version : Darwin 14.5.0



SAT SMART Driver Version : N/A

ATA Command Support Tolerance : verypermissive

N of drives in report : 1







### DRIVE 1 OF 1 ###

Last Checked : 29 Oct 2015 02:08:57 EET

Last Checked (ISO 8601 format) : 2015-10-29T02:08:57



Advanced SMART Status : OK

Overall Health Rating : GOOD 71.0%

Overall Performance Rating : GOOD 71.0%

Issues found : 0



Serial Number : S321J9FG500155

WWN Id : 5 0004cf 20fa7e370

Volumes : MiniRAID

Device Path : /dev/disk0

Total Capacity : 2.0 TB (2 000 398 934 016 Bytes)

Model Family : Seagate FreePlay

Model : ST2000LM003 HN-M201RAD

Form Factor : 2.5 inches

Firmware Version : 2BC10001

Drive Type : HDD 5400 rpm



Power On Time : 1 630 hours (2 months 7 days 22 hours)

Power Cycles Count : 824

Current Power Cycle Time : 98.4 hours







=== DEVICE CAPABILITIES ===

S.M.A.R.T. support enabled : yes

DriveDx Active Diagnostic Config : Seagate HDDs config [hdd.seagate]

Sector Logical Size : 512

Sector Physical Size : 4096

Physical Interconnect : SATA

Removable : no

Ejectable : no

ATA Version : ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 6

SATA Version : SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)

Bay # : 2

I/O Path : IOService:/AppleACPIPlatformExpert/PCI0@0/AppleACPIPCI/SATA@1F,2/AppleIntelPchSeriesAHCI/PRT1@1/IOAHCIDevice@0/AppleAHCIDiskDriver/IOAHCIBlockStorageDevice

Attributes Data Structure Revision : 16

SMART Command Transport (SCT) flags : 0x3f

SCT Status supported : yes

SCT Feature Control supported : yes

SCT Data Table supported : yes

Error logging capabilities : 0x1

Self-tests supported : yes

Offline Data Collection capabilities : 0x5b

Offline Data Collection status : 0x0

Auto Offline Data Collection flags : 0x0

[Known device ]: yes

[Drive State Flags ]: 0x0





=== CURRENT POWER CYCLE STATISTICS ===

Data Read : 70.7 GB

Data Written : 3.4 GB

Data Read/Write Ratio : 20.55

Average Throughput (Read) : 10.2 MB/s

Average Throughput (Write) : 3.0 MB/s



Operations (Read) : 2 976 903

Operations (Write) : 122 127

Operations Read/Write Ratio : 24

Throughput per operation (Read) : 24.9 KB/Op

Throughput per operation (Write) : 29.6 KB/Op



Latency Time (Read) : 0 ns

Latency Time (Write) : 0 ns

Retries (Read) : 0

Retries (Write) : 0

Errors (Read) : 0

Errors (Write) : 0





=== PROBLEMS SUMMARY ===

Failed Indicators (life-span / pre-fail) : 0 (0 / 0)

Failing Indicators (life-span / pre-fail) : 0 (0 / 0)

Warnings (life-span / pre-fail) : 0 (0 / 0)

Recently failed Self-tests (Short / Full) : 0 (0 / 0)

I/O Errors Count : 0 (0 / 0)

Time in Under temperature : 0 minutes

Time in Over temperature : 0 minutes





=== IMPORTANT HEALTH INDICATORS ===

ID NAME RAW VALUE STATUS

5 Reallocated Sector Count 0 100% OK

197 Current Pending Sectors Count 0 100% OK

198 Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 100% OK

199 UDMA CRC Error Count 0 100% OK





=== TEMPERATURE INFORMATION (CELSIUS) ===

Current Temperature : 30

Power Cycle Min Temperature : 25

Power Cycle Max Temperature : 30

Lifetime Min Temperature : 19

Lifetime Max Temperature : 47

Recommended Min Temperature : -5

Recommended Max Temperature : 80

Temperature Min Limit : -10

Temperature Max Limit : 85





=== DRIVE HEALTH INDICATORS ===

ID | NAME | TYPE | UPDATE | RAW VALUE | VALUE | THRESHOLD | WORST | STATUS | LAST MODIFIED

1 Raw Read Error Rate Pre-fail online 0x0 100 51 100 71.0% OK 29/10/15 02:08

2 Throughput Performance Life-span online 0 252 0 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

3 Spin Up Time Pre-fail online 2 706 92 25 91 89.3% OK 29/10/15 02:08

4 Start Stop Count Life-span online 1 123 99 0 99 99.0% OK 29/10/15 02:08

5 Reallocated Sector Count Pre-fail online 0 252 10 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

7 Seek Error Rate Life-span online 0x0 252 51 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

8 Seek Time Performance Life-span offline 0 252 15 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

9 Power On Hours Life-span online 1 630 100 0 100 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

10 Spin Retry Count Life-span online 0 252 51 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

12 Power Cycle Count Life-span online 824 100 0 100 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

191 G-Sense Error Rate Life-span online 0 252 0 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

192 Power-Off Retract Count Life-span online 0 252 0 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

194 Temperature (Celsius) Life-span online 30 64 0 56 64.0% OK 29/10/15 02:08

195 Hardware ECC Recovered Life-span online 0x0 100 0 100 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

196 Reallocated Event Count Life-span online 0 252 0 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

197 Current Pending Sectors Count Life-span online 0 252 0 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

198 Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count Life-span offline 0 252 0 252 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

199 UDMA CRC Error Count Life-span online 0 200 0 200 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

200 Multi Zone Error Rate Life-span online 17 100 0 100 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

223 Load Retry Count Life-span online 6 100 0 100 100% OK 29/10/15 02:08

225 Load Cycle Count Life-span online 272 492 74 0 74 74.0% OK 29/10/15 02:08







=== DRIVE ERROR LOG ===

error log is empty





=== DRIVE SELF-TEST LOG ===

self-test log is empty

Both HDDs have similar parameters reported. LCC is already half lafe-span, so in other words HDD is half-dead
Tried to use hdapm but get: "Failed APM not supported". Tried this solution https://ocroquette.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/how-not-to-kill-a-brand-new-hard-disk/
It works once and after power cycle settings are reset.

 

[simonsi]

LCC is already half lafe-span, so in other words HDD is half-dead

Nonsense, HDDs generically don't have anything like a predictable life-span, that is purely a guess, it will work until it fails, likely giving 2-6yrs life.

 

[harrybodes]

Hi guys, I know this thread is a little old, but I've got an MBP 15" late 2011 with an optibay 1 TB drive that failed. I bought the M9T drive and can't get it to work, it says:

Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed. Operation failed...​

I've read some forums about something to do with the sata read speeds but i'm very confused right now and not sure what to make of it, the previous drive was also a samsung drive (HN-M101MBB)

Does anyone know how/if I could fix this? I would be grateful thanks.

 

[Rich-GB]

In exactly the same postion as harrybodes.

Trying to put the Samsung ST2000LM003 drive in the Optibay of my early-2011 15" MBP with no success. (The drive was sucessfully extracted from the latest Seagate USB extenal enclosure)

Same error message on formatting. Tried the jumper solutuion mentioned eaerlier, but resulted in exactly the same behviour. At least I understand the reasons now having read this thread.

Is there any new information, please.

Many thanks

 

[niteflyr]

2011 15" and 17" MBP's don't play nice with newer SATA III drives in the opti-bay.
This per OWC:

Testing has demonstrated that Apple factory hardware does not reliably support a 6G (6Gb/s) Solid State Drive or Hard Disk Drive in the optical bay of 2011 MacBook Pros (ModeI ID8,1; 8,2; 8,3). If your OWC Data Doubler bundle comes with a 6G drive, you should ONLY install that drive in the main drive bay and utilize the Data Doubler to re-task your existing drive or install a new 3G SSD or HDD in the optical bay. PRE-2011 models can utilize a 6G drive in the optical bay, but will do so at a reduced 3G (3Gb/s) speed.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DDAMBS0GB/ (scroll to bottom of page)

Some people have had success with this opti-bay caddie:

http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=OBSXGB-XTRM