do u find the 4gb of SSD to be enough? and when its not using the 4gb is it still pretty fast? and lastly, does it change your the stored files in the 4gb pretty quick if you change ur daily used program
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Seagate momentus XT noise, heat, battery life
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do u find the 4gb of SSD to be enough? and when its not using the 4gb is it still pretty fast? and lastly, does it change your the stored files in the 4gb pretty quick if you change ur daily used program
do u find the 4gb of SSD to be enough?
You cannot only write to the SSD part of the drive so this question cannot really be answered. The Seagate momentus uses an adaptive memory so as you use a specific program more and more it detects which files are used the most and allocates those into the 4GB of NAND flash. Most of the time, the OS files are used most often and thus they get allocated into the flash.
You cannot only write to the SSD part of the drive so this question cannot really be answered. The Seagate momentus uses an adaptive memory so as you use a specific program more and more it detects which files are used the most and allocates those into the 4GB of NAND flash. Most of the time, the OS files are used most often and thus they get allocated into the flash.
Installing in a Mac Pro
I've read a lot of articles about how the drive that shipped with the Mac Pro was a bit disappointing, so I decided to speed things up with a new drive. I got two drives -- a 500GB Momentus XT and a 2TB Hitachi 7k2000, both from NewEgg.
I'm interested to see how things go. I used the Icy Dock 2.5" to 3.5" converter (yeah, it's plastic) and put some rubber band pieces between the drive and the case so any vibration would be dampened.
SuperDuper! is copying the drive now (using my MacBook Pro to write this) -- if I remember I'll post back my thoughts and impressions after a few days of use.
The 2TB drive is for backups.
I've read a lot of articles about how the drive that shipped with the Mac Pro was a bit disappointing, so I decided to speed things up with a new drive. I got two drives -- a 500GB Momentus XT and a 2TB Hitachi 7k2000, both from NewEgg.
I'm interested to see how things go. I used the Icy Dock 2.5" to 3.5" converter (yeah, it's plastic) and put some rubber band pieces between the drive and the case so any vibration would be dampened.
SuperDuper! is copying the drive now (using my MacBook Pro to write this) -- if I remember I'll post back my thoughts and impressions after a few days of use.
The 2TB drive is for backups.
just installed this drive, some first impressions...
- boot time reduced noticeably
- application launch time is faster, but not as noticeable of a difference as boot time reduction
- I would say the vibration of the drive is typical going from <= 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm. The stock drive I never noticed spin ups and/or vibrations. The XT I can feel the slight vibration through the palm rest. But like I said typical, not anything out of the ordinary. If you have owned a 7200 rpm 2.5" drive before, you won't be surprised. Is it annoying or overly noticeable? Not to me. I have a Thinkpad T61p with a 7200 rpm drive in it and it's the same amount of vibration.
- Noise? I only hear a hum if I put my ear down to the palm rest, otherwise nice and silent, more silent than a typical 7200 rpm IMO
- Battery life... very hard to gauge, especially for just changing a component like a HD, it all depends on usage.
- Heat? I've gone through a 1.5hr time machine restore and a subsequent new backup that is taking forever so the new drive has been very busy and I don't feel any abnormal heat on the palm rest. My Thinkpad's HD runs hotter than this under normal use, so a very vague non-scientific answer would have to be less than normal heat build up YMMV
Bottom line, would I recommend this drive to a friend? Everything I've seen so far, absolutely! Ask me again a year or two down the road once these drives have longevity tests, if it holds up to my use down the road I would not hesitate purchasing it again.
- boot time reduced noticeably
- application launch time is faster, but not as noticeable of a difference as boot time reduction
- I would say the vibration of the drive is typical going from <= 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm. The stock drive I never noticed spin ups and/or vibrations. The XT I can feel the slight vibration through the palm rest. But like I said typical, not anything out of the ordinary. If you have owned a 7200 rpm 2.5" drive before, you won't be surprised. Is it annoying or overly noticeable? Not to me. I have a Thinkpad T61p with a 7200 rpm drive in it and it's the same amount of vibration.
- Noise? I only hear a hum if I put my ear down to the palm rest, otherwise nice and silent, more silent than a typical 7200 rpm IMO
- Battery life... very hard to gauge, especially for just changing a component like a HD, it all depends on usage.
- Heat? I've gone through a 1.5hr time machine restore and a subsequent new backup that is taking forever so the new drive has been very busy and I don't feel any abnormal heat on the palm rest. My Thinkpad's HD runs hotter than this under normal use, so a very vague non-scientific answer would have to be less than normal heat build up YMMV
Bottom line, would I recommend this drive to a friend? Everything I've seen so far, absolutely! Ask me again a year or two down the road once these drives have longevity tests, if it holds up to my use down the road I would not hesitate purchasing it again.
hmmmm, interesting....im curious to know about the battery life....and ill have to see how the 5400 stock drive holds up and if it satisfys my needs...if not ill probably switch it up
Would this drive be worth the extra money if I am already using an 80 gb intel x-25 as my boot/app drive and the momentus XT just as a secondary 500 gb scratch disk in the optical bay?
I dunno if that is worth it. I have an 80gb in the optical bay as the boot drive, and a hitachi 7200 500gb in the regular bay. Works very nicely. I think there would only be a marginal increase in speed since you are using your ssd as your boot drive.
On first boot up, I didn't notice a significant speed up on boot, about 40 seconds from power to login screen; I didn't expect it though, since most reviews have said you start to see the significant improvements on the 2nd or 3rd go-round. Application startup was definitely faster. VMWare Fusion, Chrome, Safari 5, Firefox, Evernote, NetNewsWire and iTerm all popped up a lot faster than I am used to, and my startup stuff did as well. QuickSilver, iStat Menus, Snapz Pro X, Jungle Disk start up automatically, and were very snappy, even on first boot. Looking forward to playing with it more when I get home from work.
Noticeably faster, still very quiet. Restart to booted with all my startup stuff loaded was 55 seconds, much faster than the 1.5 to 2 minutes I was used to. Apps I load regularly also loaded more quickly, and the system generally was much more responsive.
Granted, I'm coming from a 78Mbps 7200 RPM drive, so this one would beat it just on raw read/write speeds alone, but I'm seeing 25-50% faster load times.
Granted, I'm coming from a 78Mbps 7200 RPM drive, so this one would beat it just on raw read/write speeds alone, but I'm seeing 25-50% faster load times.
I'm going to put my 160 gb Intel G2 drive up on eBay while I can still get some decent cash for it. It has served me well for an year.
I will replace it with the Momentus XT. I find OSX to be pretty quick as it is and I'd rather have the cash and more space.
I will replace it with the Momentus XT. I find OSX to be pretty quick as it is and I'd rather have the cash and more space.
Haven't done any real tests, but subjectively, boot times are much faster. This drive is easily the best bang for the buck upgrade I've ever done. In my previous 2.4 MacBook (unibody, but before they called it a "pro" machine) I upgraded the drive to a 320 gigabyte 7200 Seagate. It was better, but not always noticeable. But this makes a huge difference. It my be slightly louder, but it's still quiet. I can heartily recommend it!
I just installed this HD two days ago and so far so good on my Core i5 MBP. This is my 3rd HD for my macbook (stock 320 gig rpm seagate hd, 500 gig 7200 rpm seagate hd, and now the momentus XT) and honestly, it's noticeably faster in boot times (from mid 40's to now mid 20's) and loads Lightroom 3, Photoshop CS5, Itunes, Firefox and mail in roughly a few seconds at most.
I can't comment on battery life since well, it seems all over the place depending upon what I do but I can say that the noise and vibration is a non-factor compared to my previous 7200 rpm drive and not that much more noticeable over my stock 5400 rpm drive. The heat seems to be the same as well. I would honestly say that if you get a good copy of this (seems to be a few weird things going on in some other copies with the clicking noise and really bad vibrations) you'll be happy with it unless you're really anal about noise and vibration. But that's just my opinion so I say try it out and see how you like it for yourself since you can just return it if needed.
I can't comment on battery life since well, it seems all over the place depending upon what I do but I can say that the noise and vibration is a non-factor compared to my previous 7200 rpm drive and not that much more noticeable over my stock 5400 rpm drive. The heat seems to be the same as well. I would honestly say that if you get a good copy of this (seems to be a few weird things going on in some other copies with the clicking noise and really bad vibrations) you'll be happy with it unless you're really anal about noise and vibration. But that's just my opinion so I say try it out and see how you like it for yourself since you can just return it if needed.
I'm still happy with the Momentus XT. I haven't rebooted in a while, but things still load noticeably faster, which I greatly appreciate.
I guess I'll start a different thread, but seriously, WTF: Early 2008 Mac Pro, dual quad core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors, 12 GB of memory, gigabit ethernet to a 25Mbps/25Mbps fiber connection, have run namebench to find the fastest name servers possible, and I still feel like my Mac Pro is slow.
OK, so I let Firefox get out of hand sometimes and I have 100+ open tabs, 4 open browsers (and sometimes 2 or 3 versions of Firefox running different profiles) -- Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari -- ssh tunnels and sessions galore, Evernote, Time Machine, and VMware running some video monitoring software (Dog Poop Cam -- gonna catch whomever is letting their dog crap in my yard).
Yet load average is usually 0.5 to 1.0 (full load would be 8.0), memory usage is at 50-60%, and disk activity is reasonable. What is wrong?
I guess I'll start a different thread, but seriously, WTF: Early 2008 Mac Pro, dual quad core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz processors, 12 GB of memory, gigabit ethernet to a 25Mbps/25Mbps fiber connection, have run namebench to find the fastest name servers possible, and I still feel like my Mac Pro is slow.
OK, so I let Firefox get out of hand sometimes and I have 100+ open tabs, 4 open browsers (and sometimes 2 or 3 versions of Firefox running different profiles) -- Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari -- ssh tunnels and sessions galore, Evernote, Time Machine, and VMware running some video monitoring software (Dog Poop Cam -- gonna catch whomever is letting their dog crap in my yard).
Yet load average is usually 0.5 to 1.0 (full load would be 8.0), memory usage is at 50-60%, and disk activity is reasonable. What is wrong?
I have it for about a week in old Macbook Pro 2.33, i noticed that is a lot louder, than my previous WD Black 320GB (which was exceptional in 7200rpm 2,5" driver, quiet, cool etc, Momentus XT sounds like a quiet fan and i can hear seek sound from about 1m away, still tolerable, at least i know that it is doing something) I never owned a better hard drive than WD black 2,5" and i get 3 of them for PS3 and another Macbook). I dont trust Seagate so well, because i get many of them into hands (im selling computer parts) and many series has got terrible, really terrible firmware problems, heat issues etc... but i still bought it 
.
Since i have only SATA 150 (SATA I) on this chipset, there is not as big difference as i expected, especially booting up the OSX. I have old instalation and upgrade from Leopard, so i know that it is full of stuff and its booting slower. Maybe its problem with temperature sensors, because is stuck on gray screen for about 15-20 seconds, than it starts to boot. I propabbly shoult reset PRAM and other options. I also have some sleeping problems, but this should be soulved also by PRAM reset...
Great for internet browsing, because all caches from Safari or Firefox loads faster, so no lag after first open etc, great compromise between speed and space. Itunes artworks are loading amazingly fast in 9.1 and almost immediatelly after 9.2 update.
Overally, the Momentus XT isnt as much faster than the older WD Black that i had, in overall performance, but it almost erased some issues that i had about hard drives in every computer, like browser lag, itunes artworks, slow computer performance with rar and zip archive decompressing (i should thank to the 32MB cache). I hope that it will show its full potential next week, when i get i7 MBP... and test it in Parallels and other IO sensitive tasks (how fast the mechanical part is).
.Since i have only SATA 150 (SATA I) on this chipset, there is not as big difference as i expected, especially booting up the OSX. I have old instalation and upgrade from Leopard, so i know that it is full of stuff and its booting slower. Maybe its problem with temperature sensors, because is stuck on gray screen for about 15-20 seconds, than it starts to boot. I propabbly shoult reset PRAM and other options. I also have some sleeping problems, but this should be soulved also by PRAM reset...
Great for internet browsing, because all caches from Safari or Firefox loads faster, so no lag after first open etc, great compromise between speed and space. Itunes artworks are loading amazingly fast in 9.1 and almost immediatelly after 9.2 update.
Overally, the Momentus XT isnt as much faster than the older WD Black that i had, in overall performance, but it almost erased some issues that i had about hard drives in every computer, like browser lag, itunes artworks, slow computer performance with rar and zip archive decompressing (i should thank to the 32MB cache). I hope that it will show its full potential next week, when i get i7 MBP... and test it in Parallels and other IO sensitive tasks (how fast the mechanical part is).
I thought I'd "bump" this thread to see if anyone wanted to contribute their second evaluation, now that it's been several months.
I am interested to see if any of the problems have now arisen or if the drive is still the correct choice. I pretty much wait on new technology for a bit to see if kinks need to be worked out, and of course for prices to drop.
Anything you want to contribute I am sure others as well as myself, would be very interested.
Thanks
I am interested to see if any of the problems have now arisen or if the drive is still the correct choice. I pretty much wait on new technology for a bit to see if kinks need to be worked out, and of course for prices to drop.
Anything you want to contribute I am sure others as well as myself, would be very interested.
Thanks
I bought with my i7 macbook pro (about three months ago). A had terrible freezing problems, i upgraded HDD firmware, but i didnt help. I started to blame Seagate, and stupid engineers (i know that Seagate hard drives arent very reliable, they just die when they want to...). But guess what happened after Apple release of new firmware for the i7 MBP.... freezes are gone.
Now its just really fast, quiet and cool hard drive. I can hear it, but its still a very quiet drive (only my previous WD Scorpio Black was better in this way).
The performance gain isnt as big as you expect, since OSX uses different app and RAM management, than windows. On Windows, the speed increase is huge, on OSX only slight, but still noticeable, especially booting (but how many times a day do you boot up?).
Now its just really fast, quiet and cool hard drive. I can hear it, but its still a very quiet drive (only my previous WD Scorpio Black was better in this way).
The performance gain isnt as big as you expect, since OSX uses different app and RAM management, than windows. On Windows, the speed increase is huge, on OSX only slight, but still noticeable, especially booting (but how many times a day do you boot up?).
Hey guys.. I can just replace my stock hard drive on my new mbp with this and my applecare is still valid, right?
I'm still loving this drive. There is an optional firmware update available (SD23) from seagate to address to the beach ball issue.
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=215451&NewLang=en
It's optional because it's a trade-off, not one I'm willing to make personally. The new firmware disables spindowns completely. No thanks seagate I'll wait for SD24, I like my battery life and cooler running temps of a hard drive that spins down.
Battery life vs the stock hard drive is diminished noticeably, but I expected and can live with this.
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=215451&NewLang=en
It's optional because it's a trade-off, not one I'm willing to make personally. The new firmware disables spindowns completely. No thanks seagate I'll wait for SD24, I like my battery life and cooler running temps of a hard drive that spins down.
Battery life vs the stock hard drive is diminished noticeably, but I expected and can live with this.
So to do this update do you have to run it on windows? I see you can create an iso bootable cd for intel devices, can you do that for mac?
Hey guys, I bought a Seagate Momentus XT 500Gb / SSD 3 days ago and when I install it on my MBP takes for ever to start up.
Is there any special update for MBP or any special procedure to install it?
I have Mac OS X 10.6.4 with all patches.
cheers
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MBP 13" 2.53 C2D 4GB / 320GB - iPhone 3GS 32GB Black
Is there any special update for MBP or any special procedure to install it?
I have Mac OS X 10.6.4 with all patches.
cheers
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MBP 13" 2.53 C2D 4GB / 320GB - iPhone 3GS 32GB BlackIf you just got it, it will already have the newest firmware. Got mine almost a month ago and it has the newest hardware still beachballs in microsoft word
still beachballs in microsoft word
Not sure honestly, I haven't tried updating. You can check out the support forums on seagates site for more info. Lots of mac users reporting results in those threads.
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-and/bd-p/Momentus