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

[Ginge]

Well, this is not looking good for me. I've been without a hd in my laptop for a month now... I was hopefully waiting for a new firmware to be released that will solve the problems of lagging, battery draing, spinning down issues, odd noises, etc.. but it seems like it's so far away from happening. The drive has been sitting in an anti static bag and my laptop has been sitting drive-less in my closet collecting dust. I relied on that laptop heavily, so going without it for the past month has been a major inconvienience. 

I am very loyal to Seagate, and have always defered to their drives over any other manufacturer, but this particular drive has really put a sour taste in my mouth. Even if SD25 was released today, there is no guarantee that the drive won't have problems 6 months from now. I guess I have to eat the money I spent on the drive and spend money on a WD at this point, which is not something I wanted to do. 

[dkwhite1971]

I'd like to add something really quickly, so people know that it's not just me.  I'm A Plus, MCDST, MCSA, MCSE, and CCNA Certified.  

The Momentus XT 500 gigabyte drive is currently running in a Dell XPS 15 L501X system running Windows 7 64 bit ultimate.  And I work on, upgrade, and repair laptops as my side business, and I've never had a notebook drive run this hot. 

unfortunately I have to continue to recommend WD drives instead of Seagate because of this experience. 

[Seagee]

Hi Again STX_NB,

I have sent you 2 private messages over the last couple weeks regarding getting a new tester drive with SD25 and still have heard no response.  Even when you specifically asked folks to write you and sign up for the latest batch to go out.

I have been extremely patient and polite, even grateful for your diligence.  But it bums me out when you are still asking others to PM you to get more personal service and yet all of my messages have gone ignored.

Can you please respond?

Thanks,

Chris

[plucker]

I'm losing patience as well here.  I'm starting to get all sorts of weird OS issues on late 2009 MBP now.  Software that used to work is crashing occasionally and other software is playing up.  For the first time ever today iTunes refused to sync with my iPhone, something had got corrupted meaning another half hour wasted going through a lengthy delete and re-install process with multiple restarts.  I never used to have these issues and I can only think it's the Momentus XT messing things up.  I'm suspicious that the shifting of stuff on an off the SSD part of the drive is causing corruptions but have no proof or way of proving this.

Seagate have really messed up with this drive as can be seen here.

I'll give it another couple of weeks and if there's no answer here then the drive will be going back for a refund and I'll be getting a 500GB replacement.  Any suggestions?  I'll miss the speedier boot-ups but I won't miss the hassle of having to mess about with the software every week or so.

[Fozzie]

---

Seagee wrote:

Hi Again STX_NB,

I have sent you 2 private messages over the last couple weeks regarding getting a new tester drive with SD25 and still have heard no response.  Even when you specifically asked folks to write you and sign up for the latest batch to go out.

I have been extremely patient and polite, even grateful for your diligence.  But it bums me out when you are still asking others to PM you to get more personal service and yet all of my messages have gone ignored.

Can you please respond?

Thanks,

Chris

---

I'm in the exact same situation. I gave my personal details to STX_NB and he told me that he is sending me the drive on an overnight shipping last Monday (A week ago). He told me to send him a PM if the drive would not arrive on Tuesday. I didn't receive it yet and my PMs seems to be ignored. I really don't know what is going on... I would like to know.

Thanks.

A

[pzink]

I also wrote a PM, and although I didn't expect a drive to test, since I'm not in the US, I expected at least an answer. Perhaps too many PMs?

It is a frustrating situation. I'm reading this forums daily expecting a solution, but nothing.

On a side note, my machine has not crashed for more than a day, coincidentally with a weather change and a lot less heat sensation. And my more severe problems started in the middle of summer. Too much heat because the drive doesn't slow down? Perhaps it's a coincidence, but I don't know...

p

[jcbauerca]

Hey Folks, I just spoke to STX_NB from Seagate.  They are working their butts off trying to figure out the problems with the XT and have shipped out quite a number of drives with SD25 to testers to resolve the problems. 

They are reading this forum and have noted everybody's problems so please be a little patient if you can.

[robertmac]

I guess lot of us been very patience here, I have PM STX_NB about 2 weeks ago asking for the SD25 test drive or the SD25 beta patch files but still no reply.

The SD25 was told two to four weeks away back in 22-Feb, but we still haven't see it

i have two 500GB XT one with SD23 one with SD24 and i can say it really annoying to keep changing it to on the MBP2011 and have live with the freezing, lagging, battery draing, spinning down issues, odd noises, etc. (i paid $200 AUD EACH for those drive)

2 days ago i decide to give WD black drive a try, which cost me $75AUD for the 500GB, i haven't encount any issus so far.

What i'm trying to say here is, i hope the SD25 fix all the bug and problems for the length of the time we have all been waiting.

[STX_NB]

Hello everyone,

Tonight I sent 15 people SD25 test firmware.  These folks wrote me for drives or code and since I'm out of drives for the time being I sent them code.    If you didn't get the email it's because I didn't have your email and I struggle with the attachment on the forum application - might be too large.  My offer of code still stands if you want to upgrade - send me a note with your email address. 

For those who still have issues with the drive not spinning down, I'd like to see if the following application solves your problem for you.  Looks like Otooto had some good success with this.  I'm reposting his comments so you can see for yourself.

Re: SD24 Didn’t Fix Your Issues?

 

03-11-2011 04:34 PM

One of my complaints is that the drive wouldn't sleep even when the rest of the system did. There is the chance that it's a background process running that is specific to my configuration that is interfering,  I couldn't determine this using Console and Activity Monitor.

I'm going to try this Pleasesleep app. You can set preferences including logging. I'll retest the drive and see what I find logged.

http://www.dragonone.com/products/macosx/pleasesleep/

PleaseSleep is a utility software designed for Mac OS X that helps put your computer to sleep when you know some other app is preventing your Mac from going to sleep. 

PleaseSleep sits in the background and waits for the sleep timer you set in Energy Saver preferences pane. Depending on the preferences you set, PleaseSleep will try to put your computer to sleep when the scheduled sleep timer kicks in. PleaseSleep is very easy to configure, you can enable, disable, and access its preferences via the system menu bar icon. You can choose to have PleaseSleep activate the sleep function all the time, or you can tell PleaseSleep to activate the sleep function only when certain apps are running. 

[lemminkainen]

Hallo STX_NB.

As I said before in this forum, when a freeze occurs and a hard shutdown is necessary, then the drive is really more susceptible to new freezes in short time (almost 2-3 in 8 hours of work).

I noticed that if after a freeze I boot from and external HD and do a defragmentation on the Momentus XT, then freezes don't occur for a long time (normally 2-3 days).

I think that the problem to investigate are two:

1) why sometimes the drive freezes (heat? bad power management?...)

2) why when freezes occurs then the drive became really more unreliable (until a defragmentation)

Some others have noticed this behaviour (point 2)?

Are you investigating on that?

Lem