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

[RedPyramidThing]

Started having problems with my Momentus XT ST95005620AS last week, after owning it for about 5 months (in a new computer I had built). Like most people, the problem appeared suddenly, with streaming video hanging for 2-3 seconds, and then I began noticing hanging during normal operations like web browsing, word processing.

Tried all the normal stuff: Virus scan, defrag, etc. until I finally discovered that many XT owners had experienced very similar problems. 

Ran SeaTools for Windows and DOS, and it passed all of the tests. Upgraded to firmware 28 (was on 23 to begin with), but nothing changed.

Today, while watching a video, I got my first BSOD with this computer. Definitely marking this day on my calendar for celebration.

Is there anything else I can try? I'm ready to just buy a new hard drive (a traditional, mechanical HDD this time... I want to stick with something simple), but I'd like to avoid that if possible since hard drives are so expensive right now.

Thanks! 

[KrypteX]

Hi,

Can you check your End-to-End error count in SMART (RAW  value) ? It should be 0. If it is larger, your drive is basically damaged.

You can sell your MXT drive and buy an SSD + a standard 500 GB drive @5400 internally or as a USB/eSATA external drive. I would recommend Intel X25 or 320 or Samsung 470/830 SSDs for their proven reliability (64 GB suffices in most cases) + Samsung/WD/Hitachi/Seagate (in this order of prefference) 500 gig standard mechanical drive.

Regards.

[RedPyramidThing]

Is this the data you were looking for?

[KrypteX]

It is very interesting that you see lags/freezes, but no End-to-End errors.

However, I wonder hot did you manage to have ONLY 39 hours of drive usage in 5 months... are u sure that's the most up-to-date SMART screenshot ?

I would also like to see the remainder of the SMART attributes (for example, the Ultra DMA CRC error count). You could stretch your HDTune window, to include all attributes and re-post it. Thanks.

[ajarmoniuk]

Please scroll down the window, there should be CRC Error reading, see if it's above 0.

[RedPyramidThing]

Thanks for the replies. I think the Power On Hours may be so low because I only enabled SMART in BIOS very recently while trying to diagnose the problem. Here's the full SMART reading:

[ajarmoniuk]

On some Mac forums I saw posts suggesting that this drive is very sensitive to high working temperatures. Your report says it's above 60° C (140° F) and that could potentially be a problem.

However, I now tend to think that the stuttering is caused by the caching algorithm (some prefer the term algorithium) being too aggressive causing the drive to spend too much time reading the information to the SSD cache.

[KrypteX]

The drive's worst temperature was 40 degC (Seagate doesn't do the 100-Temp transformation). So that's not an issue. These drives are OK at 55-60 degC.

The issue, I believe, is that the SSD (even if SLC) wears out after a while... but it is not the case for you, you have used it only a little, under 100 hours. Some of us have already several thousand power-on-hours.

What is your OS and your Intel RST driver version (if windows)?

[RedPyramidThing]

If power-on hours just means the number of hours that my computer and hard drive have been on, then it has been way more than 50 hours since May. I've been using the computer heavily since I built it. I assume that SMART only began recording power-on hours when I turned it on a few days ago.

Here are my system specs:

OS: Windows 7

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 3.30 GHz (quad-core)
RAM: 4 GB
Mobo: Asrock P67 Extreme
GPU: Ati Radeon 5770 1G 

As for the RST driver version, I think it's 9.2.0.1011 

Also, when I turned on my computer today, it was horrendously slow loading the OS and getting to the desktop, which it hasn't done before. 

[KrypteX]

Intel RST 9.2 seems old.

The latest is 10.8. Please upgrade and see if you still have troubles. Probably you will, though... it is possible that your SSD part is degraded.