Momentus XT, Momentus, Momentus Thin, MobileMax, and other notebook drives

[WiseDrive]

The reason I have not defragged the old Momentus XT 500 drive is because it is so deceptively fast that I have overlooked how slow the mechanical portion have become --- with fragments.

Then, I made the wrong choice in testing --- cloning instead of a fresh copy on one of my drives.

Well --- lo and behold, I just discovered that the cloned drive Momentus XT2 750gb is actually quite fragmented.

Fortunately, I have a second Momentus XT2 750Gb that is a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 ---- as per my own advice.

Lesson learned:

Cloning is really not recommended ---- because in regular (normal use individual hard drives, as opposed to commercial cloning of drives for a lab etc... ) ---- not only is everything faithfully reproduced, but so are:

- wrong drivers, incompatible settings

- fragmentation faithfully replicated.

- and other problems.

So from now on... it is a fresh install, with the latest drivers downloaded from the most current manufacturer's site.

Merry Christmas!

I am still struggling with how to come up with a reasonable, fair, and replicable test that fairly shows off the hybrid's capabilities vs. a regular and SSD drive, as well as against the older version XT vs XT2.

[thegreygeek]

I guess I just don't understand!

I am using a quad-four Q6700 4gb ram, Windows7 64bit and tons of software.

In preparation for the new drive, I cleaned up my C: drive, using 1) diskcleanup, 2) glary utilities, 3) defrag'd it using smart defrag.  BTW all my data files are on other drives.

I received my 500gb drive today, and updated the firmware to sb28, and cloned the drive, rebooted a couple of times, smart defrag is running along in the background and all is well, boot times improved about 20+%: program load times have also improved the same.  As an example Corel PSP shaved off 6 seconds on the initial load after a reboot, as did CS5, and Corel Draw. The windows experience HD improved .1  about what I expected since the old drive was a fast Hitachi 7200rpm.

Now in response.  cloning works very well, defragging is ok to do.  The drive is swell.  I did not expect to see much over a 12% improvement since I had a fairly fast 320gb drive prior to the upgrade,  But it is was over 6 years old and had its share of disk errors logged.  so.... the upgrade..

I will update this if I change my opinion after a week or so.

[thegreygeek]

oh BTW, I noticed another post on this forum where someone formatted the drive prior to cloning.  This is not what should be done.

1) update the firmware

2) run Seagate's cloner using Seagate Disk Wizard

Bob

www.thegreygeek.us

[Klok]

Hey,

I think defragging is a bit at odd with the Caching algorithm.

If you move cluster around all the time, it will have a hard time tracking what you are using frequently.

For the cloning, i never understood why people reported problem with it.

Klok

[thegreygeek]

Defrag - Yep, perhaps so, but since we are talking about the Operating system drive, once it is defragged properly, not a whole lot of stuff is going to be moved around during normal background defragging.

Bob

www.thegreygeek.us

[WiseDrive]

---

thegreygeek wrote:

oh BTW, I noticed another post on this forum where someone formatted the drive prior to cloning.  This is not what should be done.

1) update the firmware

2) run Seagate's cloner using Seagate Disk Wizard

Bob

www.thegreygeek.us

---

The drive in question is a Momentus XT2 750Gb

There is no known public firmware update for it.

Regardless, there are known issues with cloning --- including incompatibilites between earlier and later versions of Seagate's cloning software detailed in this post:

---

Marixius wrote:

Furthermore Seagate has to refresh the download site concerning the Seagate DiscWizard.

The current version 11.0.0.8329 is not appropriate for cloning an "old" 512 byte sector disc to the new Advanced Format discs (4.096 byte  sectorsize).

After cloning Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail were able to rebuild their databases.

Windows Update still was not working after cloning, MicrosoftFixit50202.msi could not solve the problem either.

Finally MicrosoftFixit.wu.Run.exe did the trick.

Seagate needs to improve their instructions for installing Windows Vista or even Windows7 on Advanced Format discs as during installation new drivers may be needed.

I was lucky to solve my clone problems with help and patience of a few Dutch guys in another forum.

Cloning a system disc to a new disc is not as easy as Seagate likes me to believe.

https://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/laptop-hard-drives/

http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/flash/laptop/laptop.html

Even the above tutorial directs me to the wrong Seagate DiscWizard download.

---

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/Vista-problems-after-cloning-a-ST9320421A...

Cloning is the best way to introduce incompatibilities and mystery problems.

It is not recommended.