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

[JanJanowski]

Thanks for that info... Yes, it would be a hassle to walk the raid drives through the laptop 2nd drive location for the update....

But since you aren't seeing a difference, I'll stay where I'm at with these raid drives...

I'm very pleased with the operation of the Momentus XT 500 drives as a Raid 0 array via Esata in the laptop...

Thanks for your reply...

[WangChung]

**UPDATE**

Woohoo! Finally had a reason to format and rebuild the OS, so I got some actual measurements without data on the drive. This would supercede my last results ran with the SD28 firmware, and should be compared to my first SD25 tests. As I say in the test link, a lot more read/writes are up in speed, some are down.

Overall though I've shown that having the drives in R0 while not officially supported can be a worthwile investment. For ~$400 you can have SSD performance with 2TB of storage; something that is not even remotely consumer financials friendly when dealing with actual SSDs.

I'm pleased with the results, can't wait to upgrade to Gen 2 hard drives

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271726-Mini-review-4x-Seagate-Momentus-XT-in-R0&p...

[Sandmahn2]

You mentioned having issues with the APM features in a RAID configuration and went into quite a bit of detail on the topic but I didn't see a solution on how you worked around this.  

It seems I have these issues with a Dell Alienware laptop  that was configured by Dell.  I'm constatnly getting framerate issues because the platters are spinning down and the video cards are waiting for the drives to spin up.  I can defeat the issue by running the "verify" command of the Intel RAID controller application.  That is simply a trashy workaround for a system I paid way too much money for.  How did you solve the APM problem?

[JanJanowski]

Thank You, WangChung, for  your Update!   I actually saw your post weeks ago, and I was just too Lazy to update my system...

This morning, I updated my two Momentus XT Raid 0 external Raid array from SD24 to SD28...  I must have updated it from SD23 to SD24 before.... I knew I had done an update, but I did not  document it properly.... So any prior entries if you see something other than SD24, it wasn't....

Anyway..... The thing I want to post is.... I removed the drives one at a time, powered laptop down, and placed them in the laptop as the 2nd physical drive, and updated the firmware one drive at a time.... 

Just put the drives in one at a time... Updated both,  then returned them to the same slot they were in--in the Raid Array....

After both were updated, and returned to the Raid Array....  When I powered up the entire system, The Raid was still seen..... The Raid Format and media on the raid  was still  FINE!!    I played a bunch of video off the raid, and copied it from one directroy to another.... and;

EVERYTHING WAS STILL THERE----- EVERYTHING WORKED FINE!!!    I DID NOT NEED TO BACKUP OR RE-FORMAT THE RAID....

I did tests with Raptor test, and the AJA drivetest utility (both video editing based drive speed tests...  and the speed was the same as before.... for generalities... But as WangChung posted, he saw a subtle speed increase....

Seeing that I went from SD24 to SD28.... I'll be interested to see how this works over time!!!

At this point.... All looks fantastic!!!  

Jan

[WangChung]

Forgot to check this, been busy!

Quote-

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"You mentioned having issues with the APM features in a RAID configuration and went into quite a bit of detail on the topic but I didn't see a solution on how you worked around this.  

It seems I have these issues with a Dell Alienware laptop  that was configured by Dell.  I'm constatnly getting framerate issues because the platters are spinning down and the video cards are waiting for the drives to spin up.  I can defeat the issue by running the "verify" command of the Intel RAID controller application.  That is simply a trashy workaround for a system I paid way too much money for.  How did you solve the APM problem?"

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Basically, I didn't. I never heard anything back from anyone so I just forged ahead. I sort of  "cheat" the spindown issue by having the drives always "busy" by moving my pagefile, system temp, user temp, and various user document folders (My Documents/Pictures/Videos etc.) to the RAID partition. This way the array is always "busy" so I never encounter the spindown. In addition the system is faster by offloading these items from the OS drive as well as allowing a lot more storage for the default file locations.

From what I've read though, as far as single drive performance the SD28 does solve a lot of folks' spindown issues so if you haven't upgraded already I recommend doing so. The drive I ordered for my PS3 (yes I was crazy enough to get a Momentus XT for a game console!) already came with SD28 so it was good to go. I haven't had any further "chirping" from any of the drives either. Seems like it was just a break in period but it's all good now.

[WangChung]

Forgot to check this, been busy!

Quote-

----------------

"You mentioned having issues with the APM features in a RAID configuration and went into quite a bit of detail on the topic but I didn't see a solution on how you worked around this.  

It seems I have these issues with a Dell Alienware laptop  that was configured by Dell.  I'm constatnly getting framerate issues because the platters are spinning down and the video cards are waiting for the drives to spin up.  I can defeat the issue by running the "verify" command of the Intel RAID controller application.  That is simply a trashy workaround for a system I paid way too much money for.  How did you solve the APM problem?"

----------------

Basically, I didn't. I never heard anything back from anyone so I just forged ahead. I sort of  "cheat" the spindown issue by having the drives always "busy" by moving my pagefile, system temp, user temp, and various user document folders (My Documents/Pictures/Videos etc.) to the RAID partition. This way the array is always "busy" so I never encounter the spindown. In addition the system is faster by offloading these items from the OS drive as well as allowing a lot more storage for the default file locations.

From what I've read though, as far as single drive performance the SD28 does solve a lot of folks' spindown issues so if you haven't upgraded already I recommend doing so. The drive I ordered for my PS3 (yes I was crazy enough to get a Momentus XT for a game console!) already came with SD28 so it was good to go. I haven't had any further "chirping" from any of the drives either. Seems like it was just a break in period but it's all good now.

[WangChung]

**UPDATE**

I updated my drives to the ST750LX003, and it's noticeably faster. Haven't taken any benches yet (or screenshots of any at least), but I'l work on that. Switching from MBR to GPT was challenging to get th image over, ended up just copying the files over from the backup image. RAID 0 still good on the newer drives!