Some months ago, needing more storage in my early-2010 MacBook Pro (2.66GHz Core2Duo, 8GB RAM), I purchased a 7200 RPM, 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hard disk shortly after its SD25 firmware came out. I was intrigued by the "hybrid" technology, in which the drive automatically caches frequently-accessed data in 4GB of flash RAM, supplementing the drive's 32MB of conventional cache. I figured they just had to have fixed the odd bugs afflicting that drive with the SD25 firmware. My drive arrived with SD24 on it, so I performed the update (which on the Mac involves downloading an .iso, burning it to a CD, and booting into it), and tried it out for a few weeks. I started with a clean install of Snow Leopard and then a restore of my apps and data using Time Machine, hooking the Mac's original drive onto a USB adapter to speed the restoration.
Well, a month later I'd yanked the thing in frustration with its occasional odd pauses, an inability to hibernate reliably and terrible battery life. I replaced it with a similarly-spec'd Hitachi Travelstar, also clean-installed with Snow Leopard. That one wasn't too satisfying, either-- my habit of having dozens of browser tabs open made for frequent beachballs.
When Lion came out, and buoyed by hope-inspiring initial reports, I decided to give the Momentus XT another try. I clean-installed Lion and restored directly from the Travelstar via the USB adapter.
And the news is good. The machine feels like a new purchase, thanks both to this drive and to Lion's superior utilization of RAM. Subjectively, the machine is perhaps 30-50% more responsive even though I now have the new File Vault turned on. Battery life is back to about four hours, and there have been no problems whatsoever.
So it seems that Apple and Seagate have linked arms to make this technology work well under Lion. Happy camper here, and I hereby retract my previous fulminations about the Momentus XT.
Well, a month later I'd yanked the thing in frustration with its occasional odd pauses, an inability to hibernate reliably and terrible battery life. I replaced it with a similarly-spec'd Hitachi Travelstar, also clean-installed with Snow Leopard. That one wasn't too satisfying, either-- my habit of having dozens of browser tabs open made for frequent beachballs.
When Lion came out, and buoyed by hope-inspiring initial reports, I decided to give the Momentus XT another try. I clean-installed Lion and restored directly from the Travelstar via the USB adapter.
And the news is good. The machine feels like a new purchase, thanks both to this drive and to Lion's superior utilization of RAM. Subjectively, the machine is perhaps 30-50% more responsive even though I now have the new File Vault turned on. Battery life is back to about four hours, and there have been no problems whatsoever.
So it seems that Apple and Seagate have linked arms to make this technology work well under Lion. Happy camper here, and I hereby retract my previous fulminations about the Momentus XT.
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