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

[kernowsoul]

I wish this sorry excuse for a hard drive had never entered my life, it's the biggest pile of crud I've ever bought!

I'm getting the same problems as everyone else here, Mac, it completely ignores any power management commands from the OS and spins down whenever it feels like it. When I shut the computer I have to wait for up to a minute for the drive to spin down before I can move it. The power consumption is appalling and has reduced my battery life to a max of 2 hours!

I'll never be buying a seagate product ever again, I can't trust a company with such appalling quality assurance as this. Once my SSD turns up I'll be throwing this piece of junk under a truck. I wouldn't even want to sell it on ebay as I wouldn't want to inflict this crud on anyone else.

[jrui]

I don't have pauses and beachball problems with my mac using the 500Gb hybrid drive. 

The drive came with SD23 firmware.

The problem is that the drive never spinsdown. And that takes a very negative effect on the battery life of my Mid 2010 MBP 17"

Other problem I start to notice is a strange beep sound, I've posted that on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkBNc-WEAeo

The strange thing, is that this bee sound is more noticed (it happens more times) when using battery on Snow Leopard. And in Windows 7 It is not noticeable 

[ghost1026]

1.Desktop

2.asus p6x58d-e

3.Win 7

4.same Annoying problem  - computer freezes and I get "not responding". Im able to move the mouse-cursor arround , but everything else just hangs.. after a few minutes it responds again.. but thats only temporary

I got the Momentus XT 500 GB model.

[aziraphale12]

Had a Momentus XT 500gb SD23 for a week....what can I say other than "NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE".

This is the worst drive I have ever had (and thats compaired to other makers).

Have tested in 2 of my laptops.

Dell Studio 17 (1737), 4Gb ram running Vista 64 bit Business (all upto date drivers and MS patches/hotfixes)

The Good : - Runs fine, boots quickly, loads frequently used apps at a amazing speed.

The Bad: - Random spindowns which locks up the pc till its spun back up. The odd buzzer sound that comes from the drive every hour or so.

Dell Studio 17 (1745) 4Gb ram running Win 7 64 bit Ulitmate (all upto date drivers and MS patches/hotfixes)

The Good : - Runs fine, boots quickly, loads frequently used apps at a amazing speed.

The Bad: - Random spindowns which locks up the pc till its spun back up. The odd buzzer sound that comes from the drive every 15 minutes.  Once out of every 5 boots it hangs at the MS logo screen, which requires a hard power down to bring it back to life.

This really does need to be fixed on a £100 plus drive after all if just wanted storage space I could buy 2 500Gb drives for that sort of money. Hopefully if and when SD24 turns up it will sort out these issues, until then its been slung in its box in a draw.

[orixa99]

1.laptop

2.HP Elitebook 8440 P, 6 GB memory

3.Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit, with Momentus XT 500 GB

4.Performance issues with SQL Server 2008 R2 dev.ed. 64-bit

After installataion, and patched all patches and fixes from Microsoft the harddrives seems to perform well. At least as good as the original drive. However after a couple of reboots, and 2 day's later even the smallest/easiest sql-statment takes 2-4 times longer than on the original harddrive.

[Emp]

Have to add myself to the list of people experiencing serious trouble with the Momentus XT. Installed the Drive in a Macbook Pro 2008 Model (Core2Duo 2.4Ghz, 4G Ram). Worked fine for about two to three months. Somewhere along the line i upgraded the firmware to SD23 without ever having had problems with SD22. Big mistake. Things went downhill from there. The System showed frequent "Beachballing", aka. 1-3 second lockups, that could clearly be traced to hard drive access (No CPU Utilization but Hard Drive R/W skyrocketing). This got worse (read: way more frequent) over time, down to about one lockup every 2 minutes. Doing a complete cleanup (i.e. deleting cache files, rotating lock files etc., resetting the PRAM and NVRAM and the SMC) did not help much. Restoring the complete System from a Time-Machine clone brought some relief here. It shows signs of getting worse again, though. Additionally, since about 2 weeks the system frequently wont come up again from sleep mode. It will show the login screen, allow me to log in, the just hangs with the wait cursor while the status bar shows constant hard drive access. While the cursor is movable, clicking any application is futile. This can clearly be traced to the Momentus, sadly. Swapping the Momentus out for the old drive it replaces makes the machine work like a charm again. From the pattern of the problems, i figure this is either a problem with the power management or a serious bug in the adaptive learning algorithm that makes the drive go all crazy. I was quite happy with the performance and quality of the drive at first. If this can be fixed, *something* should be released as soon as possible to at least give deliberate Momentus XT users something to try. The silence by Seagate is somewhat frustrating. If the problems go on like this for some more weeks, i figure i'll have call the buy a serious mistake and return the drive. However, my persistence on the problem, i guess, shows that i'd rather have a working Momentus XT.

[bkg-g73]

1. Laptop

2.ASUS G73JH A3 Notebook PC

3.Windows 7 x64 Home Premium

4. The drive works flawless and has no noise issues working within the Windows environment. However with MOST 3D games I get hitching problems that last between 1 - 5 seconds intermittently. When I say hitching what I am referring to is the game completely halting and the hard drive light going solid for that duration. It will then suddenly release and work perfectly until it happens again. I have no crashing issues with the device, just the annoying hitch intermittently.

I have read some others with similar programs in this thread. My drive was already set to a Basic partition however I still get the problem. I have tried formatting and re-imaging with the asus disk set to no avail. I am skeptical to contact ASUS support about this issue because I don't believe it will be resolved. They will request me to send the unit in, take about 4 days looking at it and  say they found no problem with it.

[Chatbox]

This drive is causing BSOD (KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR) on me...about once a day.

Laptop: ThinkPad W510 (4318-CTO)

Drive firmware is SD23.

Seagate, please fix this issue.  It's definitely the drive.

[toledo2390]

1. laptop

2. Compal HL90

3. Win7 Business x64

4. computer freezes, need to reboot.

5. SD23

(Germany)

[aziraphale12]

After my first post I decided to have another play with the Momentus XT drive.

I have managed to stop the random spindowns and the odd beep/buzzer sound in Vista64 (Well its been running fine for the last 2 days with no issues).

For those running Windows OS's I suggest you try quiteHDD, a very small near zero impact program to control the APM (Advanced Power Management) and AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) settings of drives with a nice GUI.

I have found setting the APM to 255 stops all the issues I have had with this drive.

You can download the program here : http://sites.google.com/site/quiethdd/

Read the site for details of use of the program esp the bit about Administration rights (Its important)

Supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 200x, Windows Vista (Not tested with Win7 but it should work, if I get a few hours I'll try it Win7).

So any Windows users please give this a try and post your results back.