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

[WatsaScreenName]

WiseDrive wrote:

In my conservative, cautious view, cloning is strictly not recommended.

Too many variables, too many hidden problems (e.g. someone else's 3rd or 4th or whatever party drivers).

Your best bet is to forego cloning and just go ahead and do a fresh install with the most up to date drivers.

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If you must clone, consider using Seagate's own licensed version of Acornis called DiscWizard

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM1...

However, be forewarned that in my view, there is no assurance that it will be a "clean" clone.

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It's easy enough for me to back up my data.  Starting clean system is what I want to avoid, at least for now.

The manual for DiscWizard says it's for Maxtor & Seagate drives.  Do you know if it handles a target that has a smaller capacity than the source HDD, whether it works well over eSATA, whether it is robust when cloning *from* a Seagate HDD to another HDD of a different capacity and sector size, and whether the created clones are bootable?

[WatsaScreenName]

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WiseDrive wrote:

This is a mid-line computer that sold for maybe $600-$700.

Depending on the application and the frequency of disk access --- interface and disk performance of an attached eSATA (used only for backup and not for regular disk access by the OP) is probably irrelevant.

For the trouble of doing high jumps and contortutions, a much safer and cleaner solution is to:

A) do a fresh install to eliminate the performance and other hits from incompatibilites.

B) Buy a new computer for $1,000 with provisions for 2 drives on board

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Actually, it costed about $1200 a year ago, and it was quite traumatic migrating laptops.  And it takes forever to get my environment back, so the reason I'm cloning is to avoid that.

About the hoops, I have to bite the bullet and learn about cloning sooner or later (actually sooner), so I might as well do what it takes now.

[WatsaScreenName]

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Klok wrote:

Hey,

First, great post from Kryptex, but with way to many number

While i don't recall exactly where i've seen this, partition alignement is important in almost all situation. It allow you to squeeze the last performance drop from a Hard drive, being SSD or HDD. To perform a SSD alignement there must be some knowledge about the flash chip, page size come to mind and maybe erase block size. For hdd, it is regarding the size of sector that the disk hold. The alignment should consider the block size that your file system is using. You just match everything correctly and Voila, performance. It is not over complicated.

The question is, do we have enough information about the flash used in the MXT, and do we have enough information about the write performed to the flash?

I would treat it like a normale HDD.

In my case, I just align hard drive to a 4K boundary, it is not a big loss of data.

Klok

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Klok, I forgot where I read it (maybe even here, I've been foruming too much and am slowly responding to responses).  But the 500GB version of the Momentus XT has 512-byte sectors, though the solid state portion has 4KB sectors.  So I need to align to 4KB boundaries.  Would I be right in saying that it is the partition boundaries on the Momentus XT that need to be aligned to the 4KB boundaries, and nothing else?  I'm going to give Paragon a whirl imminently, and was hoping that it would be obvious where this as to be specified.

As well, once an initial cloning has been done to the Momentus XT, I'll be darned if this high performance drive will be relegated to an auxiliary cloning backup target.  No way.  It will displace the Toshiba MK6465GSX that is currently inside the laptop.  The MK6465GSX then becomes the auxiliary HDD that is cloned to regularly.  In that case, I wonder if I have to align the MK6465GSX partitions to 4KB boundaries, and if that is the only thing that needs such special treatment.  My assumption is no, but it doesn't hurt.  Any comments?

[WatsaScreenName]

Thanks, KrypteX.  I have the same questions as in my response to Klok.  Appreciate any response on them.

Afternote: Hey, KrypteX...I mentioned in my reply to Klok that someone in a forum said that the Momentus XT had 512 bytes/sectors...and it was you.  I saved your first response as the final one to respond to because it was the most comprehensive and I needed to give it the proper attention.  Will respond shortly.  Thanks for the wack of information!

[WiseDrive]

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It's easy enough for me to back up my data.  Starting clean system is what I want to avoid, at least for now.

The manual for DiscWizard says it's for Maxtor & Seagate drives.  Do you know if it handles a target that has a smaller capacity than the source HDD, whether it works well over eSATA, whether it is robust when cloning *from* a Seagate HDD to another HDD of a different capacity and sector size, and whether the created clones are bootable?

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The computer in question is a mid-range Intel i5 based machine that is almost certain to be not built with a top-of-the-line chipset or implementations of SATA, etc.

Factory HD is a 5400 RPM drive.

Ideas that might make a difference in a top-of-the-line machine will probably not make enough difference in this case.

Zero information is provided as to the applications being run, and intended use.

The question then becomes.... how often is cloning being done?

Why not just a conventional backup (e.g. incremental file by file as opposed to a full clone) that is much faster than any cloning process and can be nearly as seamlessly recovered?

Not enough information is given to give a good answer that is fit for the intended purpose.

I have actually never had a consumer grade situation where I found that cloning (as opposed to a very safe file-by-file backup) is a good back up strategy EXCEPT in RAID Mirrors.

Cloning almost makes sure that any minor errors, corrupt files that pass CRC and other basic tests, are reproduced.

Especially sw / installation errors and malicious software / virusus.

Now... in certain situations, like with hacked software or warez... there may be no choice but to clone....

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In any case, cloning is risky.

There is no assurance it will work in your case... it may... or not.

There is no information on your eSATA implementation both in the Laptop and in the actual external casing.

When used to clone Seagate to Seagate going through an on board, modern SATA controller, the results are not bad, but it is still dependent on the drives being compatible.

Cloning to the XT drive adds more complexity.

Cloning via the eSATA adds a huge amount of uncertainty --- including the casing, the connection, and other things we know nothing about.

Even if it cloned perfectly, there is the question of incompatible drivers / devices on your existing drive.

Layer upon layer of complexity.

So you are on  your own!

If there is a problem, you may find that unless you bill your debug hours out at zero or negative dollars per hour, the money adds up fast.

[WatsaScreenName]

KrypteX wrote:
> If your original partition (on the Toshiba drive) is not corrupted, it
> is relatively easy and safe to clone it to a new MXT drive (if it is a
> good drive, without SD24 or SD25 firmwares, be careful at this). If
> the firmware is SD24 or SD25, please first update to SD28 and run a
> full erase to clear up the SSD component.

Thanks.  That, and the Windows 7 hotfix 982018 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018), which fortunately I have.  I never realized how hard it was to find whether a hotfix has been installed, but http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/02/before-you-install-windows-7-service-pack-1 shows the DOS command "wmic qfe list full" fits the bill.

> First of all, the Momentus XT 500 GB (model ST95005620AS) is NOT a 4K
> sector drive. It has the old 512 Byte sectors:
>
> http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/notebook/momentus/XT/100610268b.pdf
>
> <...snip...>
>
> Now, it is however, important to still align to 4K, since you have an
> SSD component (which always works with 4K sectors).
>
> At any time you can easily check where does a partition start by
> typing msinfo32 in Start->Run.
>
> There you will see, for each partition on each of your installed
> drives, the "Partition Starting Offset". The operating system always
> works with 512-byte LBAs (logical block address). Older drives also
> have 512-byte physical sectors. However, newer drives have 4096 byte
> physical sectors (8 LBAs in length).

What a wonderful command!  I just used it, and I have 4 partitions.  For each of them, the partition size and starting offset are multiples of 4096. It looks like alignment will not be a problem no matter what I do.

> For old, non-aligned partitions (such as those created with Windows
> XP, for example) you will see the first partition having an offset of
> 32256 bytes=(63 physical sectors x 512 bytes) (63 LBAs x 512 bytes).
> This offset is a multiple of 512 bytes, but it is NOT a multiple of
> 4096 bytes, hence a non-aligned partition (to the 4K = 4096-byte
> physical sectors). To make things clear, the partition starts at
> LBA=63 (leaving the previous LBAs from 0 to 62 as an offset).

I am immensely relieved that I don't have that problem.  Though I've read about jumpers that offset some address by 1.  Apparently, a short term solution with (unspecified) long term consequences.

> New, 4K aligned partitions should usually have an offset being a
> multiple of 4096 bytes (4K sectors). Usually the offset is 1048576
> bytes=(256 physical sectors x 4096 bytes) (2048 LBAs x 512 bytes). The
> partition starts at LBA=2048, leaving the previous LBAs from 0 to 2047
> as an offset.

That's exactly what I see for partition 0.  Its size is 1,572,864,000 bytes.  The biggest partition is partion 1 (600,760,647,680 bytes).  "diskmgmt.msc" shows it as the only letter-drive partition (c-drive).  I'm assuming that the reason for the 4096-byte alignment is that I'm using Windows 7 (Pro 64-bit)

> You can use Acronis True Image (I don't know about Paragon) to first
> create an image file of your partition(s) (it's called backup in
> Acronis). Then, you can recover the partition(s) from that image to
> the new drive, starting with a manually specified offset. Be careful
> to first recover the C partition, and all subsequent partitions one at
> a time, and only at the end to recover the MBR+Track 0 (This is the
> basic trick, actually). The partition C from your 512-byte sector
> drive Toshiba, most probably aligned with an offset of 32256 bytes,
> will have to be copied to the MXT drive, starting at t new position ,
> with offset equal to 1 MB = 1048576 bytes. All subsequent partition
> will be 4K aligned.

By partition C, do you mean partition 1 (the c-drive)?  The offset is 1,573,912,576 (sum of offset & size for partition 0).  Why does the offset have to be 1048576 bytes?

I'm really hoping that with a bootable clone rather than a recoverable image, I can avoid delving into the fine-tuning of partition boundaries.  I don't know what the other 3 partitions are for (though I realize that they have to do with booting).

> To reply to your other question, from a performance point of view, it
> doesn't matter for an old drive with 512-byte physical sectors wether
> a partition residing on it is 4K aligned or not. For a 4K-sector
> drive, OTOH, the performance is heavily impacted if the partition does
> not have a starting offset, multiple of 4096 bytes.
>
> Hope this helps

Indeed it does.  Thanks for all of that.

[WatsaScreenName]

By the way, is there a standard way to test disk performance?  It'd be nice to know whether I avoided all the pitfalls.

I'm going to boot from the Momentus XT while it is still in the external closure, connected to the laptop by eSATA.  If it works, it means I am free to so all the diagnostics/formatting on the resident HDD that I have to (that's what sparked my interest in cloning -- Tech Support said that the best diagnostics that can be done for boot failures was to format the HDD).  I don't want to stick the Momentus XT into the laptop right away because if the resident HDD is bad, it can be replaced under warranty (which I don't want to void by replacing the HDD).

[KrypteX]

If the original drive had partitions created with a 4K-aware OS (such as Win 7), then you'll don't have to worry. The clone will keep the 4K alignment. You will be able to check, of course after you boot from the MXT with the msinfo32 command if the alignment was kept or not.

Don't worry too much, just do the clone and stick the MXT in the laptop, it should boot fine. And you'll have a faster machine (probably).

Regarding the Toshiba drive (512 byte sectors), it doesn't matter whether the partition is aligned at a 4K boundary or not. It will have the same performance.

Your questions about the offsets. I really have no idea (maybe you can find more info on the net) why the offset is set to 63 LBAs (about 31 KB) for the old drives and 2048 LBAs (1 MB) for the newer, advanced format drives. I think it is a matter of ad hoc convention. I wonder why they didn't choose 64 LBAs in the first place, we wouldn't have had this whole discussion on 4K alignment.

Keep us informed

[WatsaScreenName]

I haven't forgotten this thread...holiday season...just getting back into it, and finding my way around Paragon Backup & Recover (Free).  It looks like their 2012 version got released between the last time I installed (1 week ago) and now.  The online help isn't functional (web page not found error).

[WatsaScreenName]

Getting my head back into this after the holiday visits.

KrypteX wrote on 12-21-2011 06:40 AM:
> I've recently done almost exactly what you are up to at this point,
> so I can probably make your life easier

KrypteX, what app did you use?  I'm thinking that I should try something else besides Paragon.  I installed Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012 (free) to see if it will create a bootable clone and automatically shrink the C-drive partition to clone to a smaller HDD.  However, user manual can only be accessed from Paragon's website, and it has been giving a "Server error 404. Not Found." for 2 days.