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

[ajarmoniuk · Accepted solution]

So, I am happy to say that I had contacted support and they said that I return the drive as "broken drive" or something like that (first code from the RMA help page).

[ajarmoniuk]

I received the RMA'd drive after only a few days since sending it to Seagate which is great to me. 

Thanks, Seagate. Off to testing it now.

[ajarmoniuk]

Received drive had SD26 installed. Upgraded to SD28 on the spot.

So far, no hiccups aka slowdowns experienced. Also, SMART data are completely spotless.

# for i in 1 2 3 4; do hdparm -tT /dev/sdb; done;

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 3264 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1632.77 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 80 MB in 3.05 seconds = 26.20 MB/sec

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 3432 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1716.96 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 70 MB in 3.05 seconds = 22.94 MB/sec

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 3490 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1746.46 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.02 seconds = 25.85 MB/sec

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 3524 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1763.46 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 80 MB in 3.02 seconds = 26.46 MB/sec

(drive connected through USB 2)

So, again, Kudos to Seagate, looks good so far.

[KrypteX]

Nice, happy you got it sorted out !

You weren't anxious to first check if SD26 is really a hybrid drive's firmware ? I would have tested SD26 beforehand to see if it is really true that Seagate is really churning out plain mechanical drives (MXT with SD26) at the premium price of hybrid drives...

[ajarmoniuk]

True, I could have tested it first with SD26, but one can always force downgrade the firmware and test it. Anyway, people are reporting really slow performance with this firmware and I believe it's just a safe option.

[KrypteX]

I would have liked to see if a factory-released SD26 worked the same as a user-upgraded SD26.

After all, let's not forget that the SD26 ISO was never officially released by Seagate. It was given only to people after clearly asking directly from Seagate support.

Finally, if you check the firmware file found in the SD26 ISO, it is much smaller than the firmware files of other ISOs (SD24, SD25 or SD28). This is strange and I believe that the released SD26 (one can always find a link on these forums...) it was a BETA, with the SSD firmware part erased. Hence the plain mechanical drive performances seen by many. Actually, after flashing to SD26, the performance was on par (if not worse) than a 500 Gig 7200.4 (and worse than my WD5000BEKT)

As a final note, a report of a TD27 firmware can be found on these forums.... it's a firmware specially made for Toshiba-branded laptops having an MXT inside... Wonder why ? Maybe that's the "REAL" SD26... I'd like to test it...

Since you already flashed to SD28, I guess we'll never know exactly what kind of SD26 was actually on the drive, from the factory (maybe it was a good one... arrrgghhhh...)

Regards.