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

[lemon]

I don't think you can calibrate your battery. You can calibrate the tool that measures your battery load.

[cbl]

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ivyesq1906 wrote:

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.

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When I wrote that message I had DP3. With the upgrade to DP4, the battery life seems to have gotten a bit better. Yesterday I woke the computer up with full charge and the estimated battery life was of about 6 hours. After watching ~1 hour of a 720p movie I still had more than 75% charge, which also seems right.

The HD didn't spin down during the movie play, though. I can notice it spinning down once in a while, but a lot less than I would expect. Also, an improvement from Snow Leopard is that now the computer does go to sleep automatically after a period of inactivity, which didn't happen before.

Right now I'm using SD23 in the drive, but I'll try to upgrade to SD24 -- and later SD25 -- and do a bit of testing with those as well. I'll keep you posted.

lemon -- You can calibrate your battery: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490

[TazDev]

hi cbl. yeah please crosstest dp4 with sd23,24,25. i wish i could help but i have to keep snow leopard and work for my final exam.

but your tests would help to keep a lot of Mac user happy when lion appears. keep up the good work and info post.

[ivyesq1906]

cbl -- i was going to post that same link but after re-reading the article, i think it's saying that certain models such as the mbp 2010 13" that i have are pre-calibrated and thus can't be calibrated...

[cbl]

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ivyesq1906 wrote:

cbl -- i was going to post that same link but after re-reading the article, i think it's saying that certain models such as the mbp 2010 13" that i have are pre-calibrated and thus can't be calibrated...

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Seems like you're right and mine doesn't need calibration either.

lemon -- maybe an apology is in place!

[rob_ca]

Just installed os x lion dev preview after some efforts (momentus xt didn't like the idea of a new 20 gb partition.. thankfully a 12.5gb was enough to make a lion partition) and the experience is much, much more fluid. Beachballs are gone, but much more importantly, battery life has gone from 1h-1h30 to 3h30-4h. Night and day!

Looking forward to this lion going golden...

[ivyesq1906]

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rob_ca wrote:

Just installed os x lion dev preview after some efforts (momentus xt didn't like the idea of a new 20 gb partition.. thankfully a 12.5gb was enough to make a lion partition) and the experience is much, much more fluid. Beachballs are gone, but much more importantly, battery life has gone from 1h-1h30 to 3h30-4h. Night and day!

Looking forward to this lion going golden...

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On what type of system were you only getting 1-1.5 hours of battery life? 

[rob_ca]

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ivyesq1906 wrote:

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On what type of system were you only getting 1-1.5 hours of battery life? 

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One with a Momentus XT drive.. *rimshot*

It's a late 2008 unibody 15" 2.4GHz Macbook Pro. Ever since I got the drive, the battery life has decreased, at first the difference was small, but the later firmwares seemed to make the problem worse, to the point of getting only 1-1.5h of battery time out of a full charge of a new battery.

OS X Lion though, a whole new game. It's the first time I've seen a "4" in the first number of the batter life indicator since before I got the drive...

[cbl]

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TazDev wrote:

hi cbl. yeah please crosstest dp4 with sd23,24,25. i wish i could help but i have to keep snow leopard and work for my final exam.

but your tests would help to keep a lot of Mac user happy when lion appears. keep up the good work and info post.

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Pinging back after some time testing SD23.

I had kept SD23 for a while to have a good feel at it. It wasn't terribly bad under Lion, but there was a lot of room for improvement.

What I saw with SD23:

- I didn't notice the HD spinning down at all. The same cannot be said for it under Linux, where the spindown happens as expected -- which makes me believe that this is an issue with the OS, not the XT. I have "Put the HD to sleep when not in use" checked in the system preferences;

- Battery life is /acceptable/ in Lion. My computer is a mid-2009 13" MBP (5,5). With the OEM drive, battery would last between 4 and 5 hours in Snow Leopard. The XT gave me between 1 and 3, highly dependent on disc usage. Under Lion, the battery life under normal usage has gone up to 2-4 hours. Still not as good as with the OEM, but much more acceptable. When just browsing the internet, with not much disc activity and the display backlight set very low, I even saw a 6 in the estimated battery time for a while!

- The HD is very noisy. I'm not talking about vibrations because of disc rotation. I'm talking about HD head movements. They were *loud*.

So far, with SD24 (I have just installed it a couple of hours ago):

- The head movement noise has gone down a lot. It's very acceptable now and even close to being silent.

- The spinning vibrations seem to have gone down as well. That might just be an impression since the overall noise has because of item 1. It might be the other way around, though.

On a side note: if you have a bootcamp partition, *never*, *never*, *never* keep it mounted when you don't need it to be. I haven't investigated this one, but the NTFS partition eats the heck out of the battery, even if you're not accessing it at all, just by being mounted. I disabled automounting of my bootcamp partition, so when I need it I just fire up Disc Utility and mount it. If you don't know how to do it, refer launchcontrol's post on this forum: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t70916.html

I'll keep you guys posted on my experiments with SD24 and Lion DP4.

[TazDev]

very good summary cbl. keep up the good work till SD25

i'm very curious with the behaviour.