If it was underwhelming, why did you buy it?
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There are no specific problems to Snow Leopard. One had to update the firmware of the first XT version until it was polished. The second version was already polished at launch.
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Questions about Seagate Momentus XT - other options?
- Thread starter DCBass
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If it was underwhelming, why did you buy it?
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There are no specific problems to Snow Leopard. One had to update the firmware of the first XT version until it was polished. The second version was already polished at launch.
Option 2: Just get an SSD, and move your existing drive into optibay. There is no way around it, night and day difference in startup and responsiveness of the apps and the whole system.
And I'd bite a bullet and get at least 256GB. B&H has Samsung 830 on sale for $179: Samsung 256GB 830 Series Internal 2.5" Solid State Drive (SSD)
And I'd bite a bullet and get at least 256GB. B&H has Samsung 830 on sale for $179: Samsung 256GB 830 Series Internal 2.5" Solid State Drive (SSD)
The Momentus does allegedly do boot pinning. As in, it recognises which files are used for startup and keeps them in cache.
Maybe if you very very rarely reboot they can get wiped out, but in my experience, i reboot my machine a few times a week, and in between open many gigs of files, work in VMs etc and it still boots fast.
But then again, if you never reboot, who cares if boot is slow?
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Depending on your machine this may not be a good option.
In my case, (early 2011) I have SATA3 ports, SATA3 HD and the model has issues with the wifi causing data corruption when the optibay is used at SATA3 speeds.
Data corruption is not cool.
Given that my HD is SATA3, i can't move it to the optibay without risking that. I'd need to buy either a SATA2 SSD or a SATA3 SSD and a SATA2 HD to go in the optibay.
Not my experience. I removed my MoXT out of frustration back when I was running SL. When Lion came out, I reinstalled the drive and upgraded the OS (only). And the prior issues were gone and did not recur. (Sleep-related issues mostly.)
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Why is that? A HDD is a HDD. The caching is seagates own deal on the drive and does not interact with the host OS. So...
The best injection is an actual SSD. All these cachers have too little onboard NAND. Price is so low on SSD's now anyway.
You get a lot more storage for the buck with the hybrid approach.
The issues mainly related to sleep problems and stability. A drive might be a drive, but clearly (at least in my experience) the caching functionality added a little twist that SL didn't like. It's great under Lion and ML though.
Anyway, if a SSD with sufficient capacity fits into your budget, I agree, that's the way to go. But if the cost for the needed capacity is too high, hybrid can yield great results.
Sorry bro
I see your problem but given the advantages I'd still go the route that includes the SSD Maybe get a cheaper SATAII HDD or just spring for a larger capacity SSD (500-512GBs) when on sale and leave the optibay untouched...I have the Momentus XT 750GB and it's nowhere near as fast as SSD, besides it's a 'heater'. I use it now as an external storage, better that way
YMMV
Sorry bro
I have the Momentus XT 750GB and it's nowhere near as fast as SSD, besides it's a 'heater'. I use it now as an external storage, better that way
I picked up my momentus XT for 150 bucks (in australia).
A 256GB ssd here is about $450....
And yes of course an SSD or SSD + HD fusion drive is faster, but its also going to cost me about 4-6x as much.
That's actually not quite true. The drive decides whether to return data from its flash cache or spinning platter based on a sophisticated algorithm. And sometimes that algorithm didn't work, or so was my experience with sleep and hibernation issues with Snow Leopard.
I thought I replied to this thread already but I don't see the post, so must've screwed up. Here's how it went: I was running SL when the MoXT was introduced. I waited a couple months for the firmware to settle down and then swapped out my hard disk for one of these new wonders. And, erm, problems, like I mentioned. Eventually the flukiness was bad enough that I removed the drive and installed a conventional one. Though highly rated and supposedly fast, it was noticeably slower than the MoXT, but the stability was rock-solid.
Fast forward to the introduction of Lion. Great stuff but I wanted more speed from my aging Core2Duo MBP. On a whim, I put the MoXT back in and performed the Lion update again on it. And: kick in the pants, without the stability issues familiar from SL. (The firmware on the disk was unchanged.)
I concluded (correctly or not) that advances in Apple's low-level hardware drivers improved compatibility with the hybrid drives and their caching behavior.
I was greatly unimpressed with my Momentus XT with any of the OS's it had on it it now sits in my neat idea in theory drawer.
I'd just build the fusion drive it's in the OS and isn't going to be broken with a point update think about how many pissed off iMac user's there would be.
You could probably buy 120gb SSD and 8GB of RAM for $150 with careful shopping.
I'd just build the fusion drive it's in the OS and isn't going to be broken with a point update think about how many pissed off iMac user's there would be.
You could probably buy 120gb SSD and 8GB of RAM for $150 with careful shopping.
It is firmware based on their controller. That's why it is piss poor. It just maps "most" used and puts it in the NAND. 5-10 apps open faster and some swaps etc... Some users find benefit but I would rather have an external for storage and a pure SSD that I symlink to storage. I wouldn't call it sophisticated if it does not do what it is supposed to. Maybe just me.
First, thanks everyone for all the replies. This has been a very helpful discussion for me.
Just a few things:
1. For what it's worth, I'm on Mountain Lion, 10.8.2.
2. How do I check what my computer's SATA connection is (SATA II vs III)? Will this be different between the hard drive bay and the optical drive bay? I can't seem to find it in the hardware profiler. My MBP model is "MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 (15-inch DDR3) MC371LL/A". Will SATA III drives not work in SATA II drive bays? Based on ThroAU's and NewishMacGuy's earlier comments it sounds like I may have only SATA II on this machine and that limits what good-quality SSD's (128GB) are available.
3. With respect to a DIY fusion drive, I assume that the folks here that wonder why I am hesitant are referring to the work demonstrated by Patrick Stein (MR link). This sounds fine and all, but my two concerns are: I have no desire to possibly junk my data by messing with Core Storage in command lines; and this is still an artful tech demonstration. Even Stein himself "would not suggest using such a FUD drive in a real world scenario. But that also comes from my bad experience I had with HFS+ and TimeMachine in the past." I would be willing to consider this if Apple intended to enable this for the amateur/average user community (something with a single click, or some other simple implementation, somewhere in settings to enable this). So, unless I am mistaken, and there are simple, reliable, solutions out there, I'm not going to try this.
I don't need vast amounts of storage, but right now I think I'm leaning towards a 750GB moments xt + additional ram + an external enclosure for the current HD. I could save $40 and go with the 500GB xt... I may do that as well.
I had no idea that Time Machine can backup multiple internal disks to a single backup drive. That makes the 128GB SSD idea sound great, but given that SATA II and compatible SSD situation mentioned above, I guess this is not that realistic. Also, it seems that Time Machine does not produce a bootable backup (MR link)... which is definitely a requirement for my backup process.
Thanks again everyone.
Cheers,
DCBass
Just a few things:
1. For what it's worth, I'm on Mountain Lion, 10.8.2.
2. How do I check what my computer's SATA connection is (SATA II vs III)? Will this be different between the hard drive bay and the optical drive bay? I can't seem to find it in the hardware profiler. My MBP model is "MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 (15-inch DDR3) MC371LL/A". Will SATA III drives not work in SATA II drive bays? Based on ThroAU's and NewishMacGuy's earlier comments it sounds like I may have only SATA II on this machine and that limits what good-quality SSD's (128GB) are available.
3. With respect to a DIY fusion drive, I assume that the folks here that wonder why I am hesitant are referring to the work demonstrated by Patrick Stein (MR link). This sounds fine and all, but my two concerns are: I have no desire to possibly junk my data by messing with Core Storage in command lines; and this is still an artful tech demonstration. Even Stein himself "would not suggest using such a FUD drive in a real world scenario. But that also comes from my bad experience I had with HFS+ and TimeMachine in the past." I would be willing to consider this if Apple intended to enable this for the amateur/average user community (something with a single click, or some other simple implementation, somewhere in settings to enable this). So, unless I am mistaken, and there are simple, reliable, solutions out there, I'm not going to try this.
I don't need vast amounts of storage, but right now I think I'm leaning towards a 750GB moments xt + additional ram + an external enclosure for the current HD. I could save $40 and go with the 500GB xt... I may do that as well.
I had no idea that Time Machine can backup multiple internal disks to a single backup drive. That makes the 128GB SSD idea sound great, but given that SATA II and compatible SSD situation mentioned above, I guess this is not that realistic. Also, it seems that Time Machine does not produce a bootable backup (MR link)... which is definitely a requirement for my backup process.
Thanks again everyone.
Cheers,
DCBass
To see what you've got: Apple Menu -> About this Mac -> More Info... -> System Report -> Serial-ATA
You'll see two device trees, one with your HDD and one with the Superdrive. Select each chipset and check the Link Speed, it'll probably say 3 Gigabit on both in your case. That's SATA II. If it says 6 Gigabit, that's SATA III, but that could actually be more of a problem.
Technically SATA III drives are backwards compatible at SATA II speeds, BUT...
Many 2011 MBP-15s won't run SATA III drives reliably in the optibay even at SATA II speeds, even if they have a SATA III chipset. Not sure about the 2010s. You might be able to put a SATA III drive in there and it will work fine at slower speeds, but you might not. If you have a 6 Gigabit chipset in the HDD bay, you could put a a SATA III drive in there and it will work great at full speeds, but if you are going to do a dual drive setup (Fusion or not) and you put the HDD in the optibay, you'll lose the Sudden Motion Sensor protection and it'll be louder.
Net, there's a decent chance that you can use a SATA III SSD at much slower speeds than it is capable of (but still faster than an HDD), but a SATA II SSD is sure to work at its full capacity, which will be about the same as the SATA III SSDs on a SATA II chipset if you get a good drive.
If you can live with 128GB or 256GB, then I'd definitely just replace your main HDD with an SSD, either SATA III or SATA II if you can find a good one reasonably priced (well under $200).
If not, aside from doing the Fusion thing, the only smart option IMO is the Momentus XT, as spending $300-$500 upgrading a pre-Sandy bridge chipset just doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense to me. I wouldn't go with the first gen model to save $40 though becuase you get half the flash memory cache and thus half (or less) of the benefit.
Bear in mind that Stein's reticence on the FUD was related to the requirement that FUDs be formatted in HFS+, not to the FUD technology itself. HFS+ (the thing he dislikes about FUD technology) is the standard Mac drive format and the format that both your current drives and new drives will use if you set them up according to Apple specs, and as such I suspect that Stein would have as much problem with the format that you're going to use because it's Apple spec as he does with the FUD. I believe in that article he goes on to say that he uses (and recommends) ZFS formatting, which (like the DIY FUD) is one of those "officially unsupported" tweaks not accessible by "something with a single click, or some other simple implementation, somewhere in settings." Note that ZFS support was (like DIY FUD support) quietly added to the OS without fanfare a couple of generations ago and could theoretically be "broken" at any time.
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