Installed Momentus XT in my 13"

[midloman]

Thanks, appreciate the information

Newegg's prices are good because they sell a lot of OEM listed items without the retail packaging...

Thanks to all for the feedback. The only other hard drive upgrade I've done before was from buying the HD from a CompUSA store (retail packaging and all - a number of years ago though).

I guess I'm used to filtering through a bunch of extraneous papers and what-not when I order things and was a little taken aback by the lack of paperwork in the box and a bubble-wrapped bare hard drive. It was wrapped quite well though.

It's all good now. I hope to do the cloning and install of the drive this evening. Was going to use Carbon Copy Cloner for the cloning; MBP is only 2 weeks old, and I haven't installed gobs of SW or anything yet.

Is CCC the way to go, or is there a better/easier option (doesn't seem like it could be any easier than CCC from what I've read).

Thanks for your help.

LT

 

[Eidorian]

I guess I'm used to filtering through a bunch of extraneous papers and what-not when I order things and was a little taken aback by the lack of paperwork in the box and a bubble-wrapped bare hard drive. It was wrapped quite well though.

OEM hard drives really make you wonder who was packaging that day.

 

[copland007]

get them while you can, newegg has them instock again.

 

[1=1?]

can someone post an xbench guide to typical values for various setups?

 

[cluthz]

can someone post an xbench guide to typical values for various setups?

The drive will not give you any good results in xbench.
xbench is useless when it comes to determine the speed of the drive.
It will not access anything on the SSD part since it read and write to drive and nothing will be cached.

All results I've seen of xbench on the momentus xt is virtually identical to a normal drive.

 

[1=1?]

The drive will not give you any good results in xbench.
xbench is useless when it comes to determine the speed of the drive.
It will not access anything on the SSD part since it read and write to drive and nothing will be cached.

All results I've seen of xbench on the momentus xt is virtually identical to a normal drive.

still? everyone is talking about the results and i have no idea what they mean.

 

[trondah]

It's quite simple. The drive improves performance by learning exactly what's being used on the drive the most and storing it on the SSD. When you use a benchmarking tool, the data is generated each time and never read from the SSD.

There will be no improvement over a normal drive in synthetic tests.

 

[pilotkid]

The one thing holding me back on this drive are the vibration comments. For some of you that have received your drive after the original poster did how is the vibration on your drive?...Noise is also a concern. I have a stock 320GB HD on the current 13"MBP. How is the sound compared to that? I cant even tell I have a HD with this stock one! In the past I've used the normal Seagate 7200.4 500GB HD and I was very satisfied with the noise and vibration on that drive.

 

[midloman]

Vibration? What vibration?

The one thing holding me back on this drive are the vibration comments. For some of you that have received your drive after the original poster did how is the vibration on your drive?...Noise is also a concern. I have a stock 320GB HD on the current 13"MBP. How is the sound compared to that? I cant even tell I have a HD with this stock one! In the past I've used the normal Seagate 7200.4 500GB HD and I was very satisfied with the noise and vibration on that drive.

I just installed my XT drive into my MBP 15" 2.4.

This drive is just as quiet as the Hitachi 320 gig that came out of the machine. I don't hear or feel any vibrations whatsoever. My boot time has been cut in half (to about 25 seconds, from pressing power button to Finder screen). Apps are starting much faster, with about half the number of icon bounces as before.

I'm happy so far, especially knowing I have 500 gigs available now. Put the 320 into an OWC Firewire 800 enclosure. BTW, the little five piece tool kit OWC sells for 4.99 was perfect, all the right screwdrivers and a little plastic wedge tool that helped in getting the bottom off with absolutely no scratches.

I would agree with others; those with substantial vibration and noise may have had bad units. Based on my experience so far (albeit limited), this drive gets me more speed when needed than most 7200 rpm drives without the high cost of an SSD. I'm glad I made the purchase.

I'm a happy camper.

LT

 

[midloman]

Maybe a little

I just installed my XT drive into my MBP 15" 2.4.

This drive is just as quiet as the Hitachi 320 gig that came out of the machine. I don't hear or feel any vibrations whatsoever. My boot time has been cut in half (to about 25 seconds, from pressing power button to Finder screen). Apps are starting much faster, with about half the number of icon bounces as before.

I'm happy so far, especially knowing I have 500 gigs available now. Put the 320 into an OWC Firewire 800 enclosure. BTW, the little five piece tool kit OWC sells for 4.99 was perfect, all the right screwdrivers and a little plastic wedge tool that helped in getting the bottom off with absolutely no scratches.

I would agree with others; those with substantial vibration and noise may have had bad units. Based on my experience so far (albeit limited), this drive gets me more speed when needed than most 7200 rpm drives without the high cost of an SSD. I'm glad I made the purchase.

I'm a happy camper.

LT

Thought I'd update my post.

Initially, I couldn't tell any difference between having the XT in the MBP and the Hitachi 320. As I use it more, there is a slight difference.

I can feel through the palmrest when the XT spins up. It's nothing scary, and I don't really hear any loud noises or anything, but I can sense it's there through the right hand palmrest. If my palm wasn't resting on the palmrest, I'm not sure I would know it was doing anything. I never felt (or heard) anything with the Hitachi 320gig 5400 rpm drive.

It could be that some or most 7200 rpm drives exhibit this behavior; I can't really say. It's certainly not enough to cause any alarm; I've had Windows laptops that were much worse.

I'm still a fan. Oh, and boot times seem to have gone from about 28 seconds to about 23 seconds now.

And I'm loving the complete absence of the industrial strength fan noise my HP laptop puts out.

LT

 

[Eithanius]

Curious... Does Sudden Motion Sensor works on the Momentus XT once it's installed on the MBP...?

 

[gimmi80]

I'm getting this drive as soon as it's available on amazon.
Please post more feedback about noise, vibration etc.
Thanks

 

[Kwik23]

Ladies and gents, if you are like me and in dire need of this particular HD ASAP, head on down to Newegg as they just received some in stock. I have a shiny new one on the way. Odds are they won't last long. I didn't even get an email notification that they were in...bastards. Luckily I'm an impatient prick and kept checking periodically.

 

[typerlover]

Ladies and gents, if you are like me and in dire need of this particular HD ASAP, head on down to Newegg as they just received some in stock. I have a shiny new one on the way. Odds are they won't last long. I didn't even get an email notification that they were in...bastards. Luckily I'm an impatient prick and kept checking periodically.

+1, except for I'm not in dire need of the new HD.

I'm just pissed with the slowness of the stock 500gb 5400rpm in my 15" i7 and hope this will sharpen things up quite a bit. Overnight shipping, should get here on Friday, so I expect this weekend for my computing experience to be improved.

 

[gimmi80]

I forgot
please also comment on battery life compare to stock 5400 HD

Thanks

 

[TheWart]

I forgot
please also comment on battery life compare to stock 5400 HD

Thanks

Yea, I know a number of us would appreciate any more feedback from owners of this drive. I almost pulled the trigger when Newegg got their new batch in today, but the handful of reports of excessive vibrating and noise makes me nervous. Also, I use VMWare Fusion a lot and keep WinXP loaded up most of the time in Fusion, and I am not sure that would work well with how this drive works (since it can't very well put the whole VMware image in the ssd portion, will me loading it 'erase' the ssd cache every time?)

 

[gimmi80]

Yes that's important. Keep it up.

 

[trondah]

but the handful of reports of excessive vibrating and noise makes me nervous.

A platter spinning at 7200RPM will sound pretty much the same no matter what brand it is. That said, it does seem less audible than my previous 7200RPM drive.

It's certainly more audible than the stock 5400RPM Hitachi though. Personally I'll live with it considering the price and speed. I can hear it quite well in a silent room but don't notice it during normal use.

Also, I use VMWare Fusion a lot and keep WinXP loaded up most of the time in Fusion, and I am not sure that would work well with how this drive works (since it can't very well put the whole VMware image in the ssd portion, will me loading it 'erase' the ssd cache every time?)

No, it won't.

A. The drive does not know about filesystems, it caches (small) reads. Thus it will even cache reads inside the image.
B. Even if it did try to cache a large file, you never read out the entire VMware image sequentially!

I use VMware Fusion now and then, performance is great.

 

[reggie23x]

I installed the 500gb Momentus 7200.4 drive in my 2010 13" 2.4GB MB... a couple days ago and it seemed pretty snappy... my xbench score was 136.

I just received the 500gb Momentus XT drive and currently waiting for my time machine restore to complete....

I allowed spotlight to finish its indexing and i've opened a few apps.

I clocked a cold boot to login screen at 32.9sec. I dont know if that's a good...
xbench.... was like 114....

So far, it seems to be as fast as the non-xt Seagate 500gb 7200.4 rpm drive... i think i wont see or achieve any performance gains until this drive 'learns' what I use the most.

 

[henrikrox]

boot a couple of more times and after some regular use, you should see a difference, mid 20's boot times atleast

 

[reggie23x]

Installed Momentus XT in my 13"

I just returned to my laptop after it sat off for the last 6 hours. I didnt time it's bootup, but i reran xbench and score a 133.44 after an initial score of 114.

I'll keep running doing this for a few day and report it's progress.

Otherwise, every seems as quick or quicker than with the 500gb momentus 7200.4 drive.

I do not notice any obvious noise or vibrations.

 

[mrkgoo]

Any more clues as to why infoworld suggested that we don't clone onto the momentus xt?

 

[Lokrado]

That can't be right. Run it a couple more times. I get a 55.67 with a regular Momentus 7200.4

Results 187.72
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.6.3 (10D2101a)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro6,1
Drive Type ST9500420ASG

Disk Test 59.48
Sequential 132.53
Uncached Write 172.95 106.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 144.17 81.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.09 24.03 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 189.33 95.16 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 38.34
Uncached Write 12.59 1.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 164.93 52.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 82.06 0.58 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 151.06 28.03 MB/sec [256K blocks]


got that with a stock 500GB 7200RPM disk

 

[greythorne]

Curious... Does Sudden Motion Sensor works on the Momentus XT once it's installed on the MBP...?

Can anyone answer the above?

Thanks.

 

[ooglek]

Its "memory" will get wiped every time you defragment the drive. So that could be a plus and a major downfall as you will have to defrag the mechanical drive throughout its life but then the ssd will be defraged too.

I'm not sure you are right. I was thinking about it, and if I were Seagate, when a move occurs, the controller could be hooked into the command to update the block map for the 4GB cache.

For example, move block 1234 2048 bytes to block 4321 2048 bytes. If that block exists in the 4GB cache, simply update the map from 1234 to 4321. Then when that block is requested, it loads from the 4GB cache rather than the disk.

Of course, since Seagate doesn't fully (or at all?) disclose HOW the caching occurs, we may never know. But I have to assume that one of the discussions they had when developing the Momentus XT had to do with common activities that could negatively affect performance, such as defragmentation, which on Unix and OS X, happens automatically and regularly. In XP it did not, but maybe Win 7 and Vista implemented the same. It would seem silly NOT to consider and implement such logic into the controller.