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

[madnj]

I would recommend doing a flash to SD28 then a full erase and then OS reload.

If your drive runs fine with SD28, you should be good to go.  If you still get freezing type issues with SD28, I'd say you probably have a faulty drive.  You might also want to take a look at S.M.A.R.T. data to see how things look.

I'd definitely recommend going to SD26 minimum to be on a firmware that doesn't have data corruption issues, but SD28 is the only available non-data corruption firmware that seems to make use of or provide the performance boost of the SSD part of the disk.  SD26 is slower, and I suspect that's because it uses the drive as basically just a spindle drive.  SD28 appears to make use of the SSD as my boot and read performance is much better with SD28.

If you run SD28 and have issues, at that point you might want to forceflash back to SD26 to see if the drive runs without those problems.

SD28 is probably the better performing firmware to use though.

[KrypteX]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the question. You first need to choose wether you want SD26 or SD28. Probably it would be better to first start with SD28 and see what happens. I can say that from what I've seen on the forums, if your SD25 has lags, flashing to SD28 will not have, and vice-versa (it's just an observation of mine...).

Please check my post 29 here:

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/Momentus-XT-1-2-second-lag-freeze/m-p/129...

You can do steps 1-4 regardless of your particular machine type.

Force flashing needs to be done only when decreasing the firmware version (e.g. from SD28 to SD26).

When increasing the version, the ISO updater should work just fine, without the manual forcing... If it doesn't, well... that's quite interesting at the least... the question is "why". In that case, you still can force flash, but be careful, you can brick your drive...

Don't use SD25, most certainly corrupts your files....

Hope this helps.

Regards.

[Bluesmanuk]

I decided to zero my drive and reflash with SD28 and put my backed up Windows 7 OS image back on but there was no change to what I was experiencing.

I then zeroed the drive again and went back to SD26 but it was too slow, seemingly reinforcing that SD26 did not use the SSD area.

I then zeroed the drive again and went back to SD25 and all is back to how I want, expect and had before, albeit with a BSOD 50% of the time when coming out of hibernation, which I will live with for the time being.

So I'm going to wait for the next firmware update to see how it performs.

[KrypteX]

Bluesmanuk, what are the boot times and program loading times with SD25 compared to SD28 ? Can you please give us a detailed description of what makes SD25 faster than SD28 ? Apart from the BSODs with SD25, I didn't experience faster characteristics compared to SD28...

[Bluesmanuk]

SD25 boots into the OS (Windows 7 SP1) and all auto apps and services in under a minute.

With SD28, the boot is around 1 minute 20.

The whole process of loading and running apps is smoother and I no longer have any lag with web browsers such as Chrome.

With SD28 I could wait between 10 and 20 seconds for pages to load.

With SD25 it's instantaneous.

The only other test that I have carried out is with some Video Editing, rendering out to the drive and found it to be up to 40% faster with SD25 than it was with SD28.

It's just the whole experience that I find far better on SD25 and where I have been most happy with all firmware updates.

[KrypteX]

Did you perform the corruption tests on SD25 ? It would be interesting if you can reproduce the issues under Win 7.

[Bluesmanuk]

I haven't performed any specific corruption tests but as an avid video editor, I regularly deal with very large files and over the past 15 months or so have never seen any kind of corruption of large files.

[Kaizanx]

Spoiler

Another disgruntled customer im afraid.  I also have issues. the drive appeared to operate fine for a while - month or so and then started to freeze, i then did a bit of searching and found reports of all these serious problems with the drives. I had SD25 and now SD28  I can work, but occasionally i get a blue screen message or a reboot and statement that drive may not be seated.  also, without fail, if i leave my laptop alones for 5-10 mins then its garanteed to have frozen.  Can shut down only way is to hold power off for 5 seconds, sometimes this casues a chkdsk, sometimes data loss.

I really cant believe a manufacturer will release sub standard products on a market in this bad a state. I have no alternative to return to supplier for full refund and like others I wont be buying seagate again.

I have rebuilt windows etc and spent many hours on this but im not technical enough to use all these tools settings tuning etc - its a hard disk for goodness sake.

can only reccomend to everyone else NOT to buy this product

[grifith]

Does someone know how to run seatools for DOS on a Asus G73SW?

I have two momentus XT 500gb installed and one of them has the "end to end error" in the SMART test (using hdtune).

I tried to run a test with seatools for DOS but it can't detect the hard drives so i would be very grateful if someone could help me. Thanks!

[GregNYR]

Thanks madnj and Kryptex for responding to my post.

At this point I decided to ship the drive back to seagate and get a new one because not sure at this point if there is any hardware damage on it. Once I get the new one I will do some tests on it by connecting it to my Pc desktop and then to my macbook pro.

I guess i'll give seagate a fare chance with the tests by starting off fresh.

Hopefully it wont take long to receive the new one.