Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Seagate Momentus Hybrid HD

BasilFawlty

BasilFawlty

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 20, 2009
1,082
3,040
New Mexico
Just wondering if any folks lately have put the Seagate Hybrid hard drive in their MacBooks. I've read mixed reviews, but the bad reviews seem to be with respect to older firmware. I'm just wondering if anyone here has replaced their HD with this "Hybrid" which purports to add 4GB of SDD with a mechanical drive for "SDD-like" performance on common use tasks and software. I'm thinking of getting this drive but would love to hear any recent experiences with it.
 
My experience in 2 MacBook Pros were fantastic. I had it in my current one (see sig) and a Late 2008 15" and they were both great. You do notice a good amount of performance boost thanks to the 4GB SSD. I would have kept it if I didn't need more space and did not sell my desktop PC. Well worth the $89-$99 (depending on price at the moment). No problems, freezing, beach balls, etc. Firmware was always on latest one. If you upgrade to a larger HDD, or to a 7200RPM from a 5400, spend the extra few bucks and get this, hands down, unless you need space. Otherwise, I'd recommend the 750GB Momentus 7200RPM (using that now in my OptiBay with a 120GB Vertex 3)
 
dlimes13 said:
My experience in 2 MacBook Pros were fantastic. I had it in my current one (see sig) and a Late 2008 15" and they were both great. You do notice a good amount of performance boost thanks to the 4GB SSD. I would have kept it if I didn't need more space and did not sell my desktop PC. Well worth the $89-$99 (depending on price at the moment). No problems, freezing, beach balls, etc. Firmware was always on latest one. If you upgrade to a larger HDD, or to a 7200RPM from a 5400, spend the extra few bucks and get this, hands down, unless you need space. Otherwise, I'd recommend the 750GB Momentus 7200RPM (using that now in my OptiBay with a 120GB Vertex 3)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. Hope to get some more on this thread too. Right now I have the minimal HD size for my "rare" Aluminum MacBook, It's only 160GB 5400RPM. So for me 500GB 7200 is a tremendous upgrade.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_9 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E501 Safari/6533.18.5)

I put one in my 2010 white MacBook. Awesome drive! Programs launch within a second or two, web pages load faster as well. It runs slightly warmer than the default drive, and battery life is lower, maybe 30 min to an hour less. I have had zero issues with freezing and lockups. I think it has the (F26?) firmware version.

Oh and boot times went from 45 seconds after a fresh install down to about 25 seconds with the hybrid drive.
 
Well, I guess I'm going to find out for myself now. I just placed an order for the 500GB version of the Seagate Momentus Hybrid from OWC.
 
Sorry to jump in here, but I was going to buy one of these for my early 2008 black MacBook and the guy at the store told me MacBook (as in non-Pro laptops) because of the plastic fabric that could not handle the heat of the 7200rpm and that I could only use 5400rpm drives or real SSDs.

How true is that iyho?

Thank you all.
 
HelterSkelter said:
Sorry to jump in here, but I was going to buy one of these for my early 2008 black MacBook and the guy at the store told me MacBook (as in non-Pro laptops) because of the plastic fabric that could not handle the heat of the 7200rpm and that I could only use 5400rpm drives or real SSDs.

How true is that iyho?

Thank you all.
Click to expand...

That is the most BS I have ever heard. Looks like the guy at the store just didn't want you to get that. Trust me, it will work great.
 
Thanks.

I figured that as well; it's just that since he was claiming it would kill my Mac, I gave him just enough credit to ask here.

So I lost a day... but I am getting the drive anyway and at another store!!! :D

Thank you!
 
Thank you guys but I am in France so amazon is not as powerful as the .com version but thanks for trying to help :)

Anyway, got the drive somewhere else and it works like a charm...
Tried to start 20 apps at once and all opened and were available within 15 seconds.

Am downloading Lion as I write, so we'll see how it behaves there :D
 
A Momentus day

I too after looking for a new drive for my late 2009 MacBook, saw and bought the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT for $115 from OWC. Great price and from what I have heard a good drive. 5 year warranty vs 2 on the regular Momentus.
 
darrennie said:
I too after looking for a new drive for my late 2009 MacBook, saw and bought the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT for $115 from OWC. Great price and from what I have heard a good drive. 5 year warranty vs 2 on the regular Momentus.
Click to expand...

The 5 year warrenty surpises me. I'd have thought it would have the same warrenty as teh non-hybrid - certainly not a better warrenty given there are more things that can go wrong.
 
Just got the new Hybrid drive today and the MAC OS installed. After playing with it for a while now, the bootup time is much faster and Safari opens almost instantly now. I think I like this drive so far!
 
BasilFawlty said:
The 5 year warrenty surpises me. I'd have thought it would have the same warrenty as teh non-hybrid - certainly not a better warrenty given there are more things that can go wrong.
Click to expand...

For me it was what made me decide to buy it after what I had been reading about the spin up/down issues wearing it out. I hope it's not a typo on the OWC page. :eek:
 
Hello.

I have a late 2007 White MB too and i need a faster HDD as i work with many files at once. Already upgraded to 4GB RAM, but i now need a new HDD and as i need my SuperDrive, i cant go with the OpticBay option. If i choose this 7200rpm with 4GB SSD, won't it affect my battery uptime? Right now i can only have 2h maximum with my normal usage...(browsing with almost 20 tabs + mirc + text editing...)

Waiting to hear some feedback. :)

Regards and thanks in advance.


EDIT: My HDD is this one: http://www.testhdd.com/FUJITSU-Mobile-MJA2320BH-hard-drive-320-GB-SATA-300-5466.html
As i can see, it consumes 1.4W when reding/write vs the 1.1W from the Hybrid. However, the Hybrid states its seek power is 2.2W while the Fujitsu states nothing about the seek power nor the idle power.
Overall, i think the power consumption won't be a problem, right? The HDD performance comparison is also almost the same - does the 4GB SSD really make that much big difference? What about the heat? It will dissipate more heat as it is a 7200rpm, right?
 
Last edited:
I'm using two of these so far in Windows notebooks. VERY happy with them. I've heard from some people using them in Macs too who also love them.

Only bad thing with a non-Windows platform is just that you'll need to work slightly harder to get the new firmware installed if you don't have it (I assume you can do that through Boot Camp).

Dankex said:
The HDD performance comparison is also almost the same - does the 4GB SSD really make that much big difference? What about the heat? It will dissipate more heat as it is a 7200rpm, right?
Click to expand...

I don't know about those specific drives, but 7200RPM drives don't necessarily draw more power than 5400RPM drives (or even than SSDs), nor do they necessarily generate more heat.

At any rate, neither heat nor power is something I'd worry about with any notebook drive-yeah, there could be some difference, but I doubt it'll be huge one way or the other.

The 500GB Momentus XT is one of the fastest mobile mechanical drives even WITHOUT the 4GB flash cache. It's physically one of the fastest, plus has 32MB RAM cache instead of 16MB like most 7200RPM drives have, or 8MB like most 5400RPM drives have.

If you're going from a 5400RPM drive to a Momentus XT, that's going to be a big difference even worst case scenario. And of course for stuff that gets in the flash cache...

In practice the XT makes a very noticeable difference to both boot and program load times, at least for all my main programs (and that's coming from a regular 320GB 7200RPM Seagate for me, not a 5400RPM drive).
 
Wolfpup said:
In practice the XT makes a very noticeable difference to both boot and program load times, at least for all my main programs (and that's coming from a regular 320GB 7200RPM Seagate for me, not a 5400RPM drive).
Click to expand...

Now that I've had my XT in my Unibody MacBook for over a week, I must say I am very happy with this decision! My boot time is now just a tad over 20 seconds from the moment I push the power button till I'm at the desk top ready to go (was about 48 seconds before with the 5400 RPM 160GB stock drive). I too notice a huge improevement in opening common applications. Even opening seldom accessed files is noticably faster!

I would highly recommend this drive.
 
BasilFawlty said:
Now that I've had my XT in my Unibody MacBook for over a week, I must say I am very happy with this decision! My boot time is now just a tad over 20 seconds from the moment I push the power button till I'm at the desk top ready to go (was about 48 seconds before with the 5400 RPM 160GB stock drive). I too notice a huge improevement in opening common applications. Even opening seldom accessed files is noticably faster!

I would highly recommend this drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's been my experience exactly. With mine, I have a 17 second boot in Windows 7 from the time the OS starts loading until I'm at the desktop (so probably a longer than yours, because that's not counting the several seconds where the BIOS is going "hey, here's some drives!"

And then also once I'm at the desktop, I can actually start using it pretty much right away, whereas always before even after the minute or whatever to boot, you'd have to wait a while before the hard drive was done thrashing and Firefox or whatever was actually loaded and running.

I've got two things that load at startup-my mouse settings, and an IM client, and now they're sometimes both loaded BEFORE the screen fades in from the login screen!

And yeah, just loading everything seems faster.

4GB doesn't sound like much, but I guess how Seagate does it is it ignores large files...so it's only caching small files, and when you really look at most programs, they're not THAT big, and it's not having to cache all of them, just the parts that are actually frequently loaded. (Like I'm sure Office is gigantic, but not the part that actually gets loaded off disk.)

It's funny...when Vista came out what, four years ago? They made a big deal about hybrid drives, and about that "Readyboost" thing. Only Readyboost didn't seem to do anything, and I'm not sure anyone released hybrid drives.

Then YEARS after I'd just thought the idea was dead, Seagate releases these, and...they actually work!
 
Wolfpup said:
Yeah, that's been my experience exactly. With mine, I have a 17 second boot in Windows 7 from the time the OS starts loading until I'm at the desktop (so probably a longer than yours, because that's not counting the several seconds where the BIOS is going "hey, here's some drives!"
Click to expand...

When I measure it that way, (from moment to display lights until desktop in up) it's 18-19 seconds with Snow Leopard. Now I just need to upgrade from 2GB to 8GB of memory and I'mm be set!
 
Ok, thanks a lot for the feedback! Will get one into my old late 2007 Macbook for sure. :)
 
That's not an XT, but...I think it'll fit? It says it's 9.5mm, which I think is the normal notebook size? Like 12mm is the other, larger size, that not all notebooks can use?

Unless I'm totally misremembering things...
 
knarzie said:
does anyone know if this one

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=467128473&pf_rd_i=468294

will fit a 13" late 2008 unibody MacBook?
Click to expand...

Should fit fine.

Have been using my Momentus XT for about a week and am amazed at what a difference it makes on my late '09 MacBook. 25 seconds to boot and ready almost immediately. iTunes, Google Earth, GarageBand all start within seconds. Now as this is a clean install of Lion I assume some speed will come from that, but wow nice drive. Have not noticed a huge battery life change either.
 
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Can't wait to get this drive. Seagate's probably loving all of this free-advertising when Google searches result with MacRumors threads praising their drive.

This drive + 8GB of memory = yum. :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back