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

[ivyesq1906]

no problem. based on your understand, what constitues proper operation of the disk sleep option? reduction in power and dimming of the screen or complete spin down (as when closing the lid)?

[TazDev]

i think it should be a complete spindown not only a power reduction. but i'm not sure about this. i think my 5400 hitachi from the macbook slept (spun down) away after 10 minutes.

[Guille779]

Well, the disk should spin down after xx minutes of inactivity, it doesn't matter if the computer's sleeping or not. My MBP sleeps just fine if I close the lid o set it to sleep, but if I leave it unnattended it'll never sleep. The display will turn off, but the HDD won't. Hence, battery life sucks.

I used to get over 5 hours and now it's closed to 3 at best. Using integrated graphics extends this by around 40 min, but the Momentus XT is the culprit here. The battery is new BTW, bought it 6 months ago and has about 60 cycles.

[TazDev]

this is what i meant. it should have the behavior like Guille779 described. this is the main reason why the battery life sucks. from 7 hours down to 3... its not only because its a 7200 rpm hdd. its because the momentus xt never tries to save battery power.

[Guille779]

I've just discovered something quite strange. I thought my MBP refused to sleep by itself, and it still kinda does... however, if I put it to sleep -by closing the lid- and wake it up, it'll go to sleep by itself on the set schedule after that. So, after each reboot the MBP won't sleep by itself until I put it to bed at least once.

[ivyesq1906]

not sure if disk sleep is working exactly how you all mention but under lion, i'm getting way more than 3 hours on the battery. closer to 5 or 6 with wireless on and 7 to 8 with wireless off.

[ivyesq1906]

Running Developer Preview 4 of Lion since yesterday.  Momentus XT continuing to run really smoothly on this OS.  I don't know what it is but the XT just seems to work a lot better with Lion than with Snow Leopard.

Battery life is comparable with OEM 5400 RPM hard drive, no beach ball or lags.  In terms of the sleep issue, i'm still not sure if the XT is spinning down during periods of inactivity, but given that I was able to use my laptop for close to 8 hours on battery (word processing, adobe acrobat, outlook, no internet, brightness turned down), I think APM is working.  I haven't tested spindown with this new version of Lion which I think is pretty close to the final version, but i will.  I do notice a subtle chirp occassionally.

Basically my advice for you guys having problems with your XT on Snow Leopard (if you're not going to upgrade to a SSD or wait for the 2nd generation XTs)  is to pay the $30 and immediately upgrade to Lion when it's released in July.  Based on my experience on my macbook pro 2010 13" 8gb RAM, i think Lion and solid firmware update will result in a good user experience with the XT.

[TazDev]

thnx ivyesq1906

i will buy lion and this is my last hope. after that i will want a refund from seagate.

but i think ur right and lion will help alot

[cbl]

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ivyesq1906 wrote:

Running Developer Preview 4 of Lion since yesterday.  Momentus XT continuing to run really smoothly on this OS.  I don't know what it is but the XT just seems to work a lot better with Lion than with Snow Leopard.

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Hey ivyesq1906

Could you specify some things about your setup? The reason I'm asking is because I installed Lion, but the XT is still not sleeping and the battery life hasn't improved -- it's still much worse than it is with the OEM drive.

On top of that, the computer seems to be heating up a lot more...

My setup is:

- Momentus XT with Firmware SD25

- "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" checked in the "Energy Saver" preferences pane

- HD sleep timeout set to 1 minute *

- Nothing being shared in the "Sharing" preferences pane

- Location Services disabled ("Security & Privacy" pane, under the "Privacy" tab)

* The default is 10 -- I changed that with pmset to test if the HD was going to spin down, which it didn't. I know for a fact that this is not a defect in the HD because in the same hardware, when running Linux, the disk does spin down.

I'm not sure what other settings would affect the HD spindown, so if you have any other ideas please include them.

Thanks!

[ivyesq1906]

i have a mbp 2010 13 w/ 8gb ram and momentus xt (sd 25).  i actually need to revise my post re: my experience under lion developer preview 4.  under developer preview 3, i was experiencing tremendous battery life, but under dp 4, my battery life has dipped tremendously.  the system is still running stable, but the battery life has been reduced by about 2 or 3 hours from dp 3.  in terms of spindown, i think i still have to run more tests because under lion dp 3, i was getting 7-8+ hours on my battery, but i didn't necessarily notice a spindown of the drive during inactivity.  i was able to confirm that the drive did spindown when closing the lid though.

cbl -- which version of the lion are you running? have you used dp 3 and dp 4 and noticed any differences?

i don't think dp 4 is the gold master version of lion, but with a release date set for next month, i think this version is pretty close. on other forums, i haven't read about other developers having issues with battery life, but perhaps my problems are specific to the XT.  i'm considering doing a clean install of dp4 to see if that improves battery life... might also try to calibrate my battery.