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

[btheriau]

Hi Maca,

You're right, It is my B plan if Seagate do nothing soon... 

Thanks to share with us your good ending, 

[DGrau]

I'm another Apple user with the ST9500420ASG 7200RPM 500GB drive. While using my computer on a stationary desk, well insulated from errant shock, my system will emit a click and a chirp from the HDD bay, and the system will pause for .5-1 second at a time in between the click and chirp noises. The issue occurs at random times, but certainly in conjunction with read/write requests to the disk. Apple has yet to admit a problem with their hardware, nor anyone else's for that matter. Either the issue lies with Seagate and their drive, or an incompatibility of this particular model of drive with Apple's hardware. I am posting here in hopes that more complaints will yeild a response from one or both hardware vendors on the matter.

[btheriau]

See this Apple's forum too: A LOT of new MacBook Pro have the same problem! 

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9817201#9817201

[nittanys1]

I too am another Apple user with the ST9500420ASG 7200RPM 500GB drive. While using my computer on a stationary desk, well insulated from errant shock, my system will emit a click and a chirp from the HDD bay, and the system will pause for .5-1 second at a time in between the click and chirp noises. The issue occurs at random times, but certainly in conjunction with read/write requests to the disk. Apple has yet to admit a problem with their hardware, nor anyone else's for that matter. Either the issue lies with Seagate and their drive, or an incompatibility of this particular model of drive with Apple's hardware. I am posting here in hopes that more complaints will yield a response from one or both hardware vendors on the matter.

This is getting ridiculous! 

[AGPX]

HI,

I have mounted the ST9500420AS 7200 RPM 500GB drive in my notebook (Asus C90S). I have the clicking noise issue too. Actually the temperature of the hard drive is stable on 55°C, that seems to me a bit too hot. So, it's not a G-Force related issue because my hard drive doesn't have this technology. This clicking introduce a delay of about 1 - 1.5 seconds and is very annoying. Could be a temperature related issue? I haven't tried it on winter yet...

[tacosauce]

Adding my own experiences:

I have a ST9500420AS, worked perfectly for 30 days, now it's doing the same thing.  I checked the S.M.A.R.T. stats (using smartctl on my macbook pro) and got:

1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 114 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 67066748

3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 100 099 085 Pre-fail Always - 0

4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 90

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0

7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 069 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 8318913 

since the tests, the error rates have skyrocketed into the high billions for raw-read-error-rate and into the millions for seek-error-rate.  

Seagate has aknowledged that this is a known issue for people with MacBook Pros.  

Goodnews!- Apple has released a firmware upgrade!

Bad news!- The upgrade can only be installed on drives issued by Apple that already have Apple firmware on them.  

Seagate has confirmed they will not release a firmware upgrade.  People like me, who bought the drive from Newegg, are stuck with a drive that will continue to malfunction until it actually dies, which is soon.  I am past my 30 day refund date from Newegg.  Seagate has offered to replace my drive but they also acknowledge that the same problem will happen again.  They will not refund me any money because I didn't get it from them

For all you PC people, I suggest getting a S.M.A.R.T. monitor that can read all the values from the drive and let tech support know that it's not just Apples that are dealing with this.

[Edited in compliance of the community rules and regulations.]

Message Edited by BradC on 08-25-2009 12:07 PM

[HughR]

tacosauce:

Your SMART stats are hard to read due to this forum's font and word spacing.  Consider using the "insert code" button.  That will make it hard to read in a different way.  Oh, and include the column titles for those that haven't memorized smartctl's report format.

It turns out that the raw values of attributes 1 and 7 are not simple integer counters on Seagate drives.  I think you have to throw away the bottom 32 bits to get a count of errors.  That means dividing by 4,294,967,296 and throwing away the remainder.

If you have error rates in the high billions, that sounds like 1 or 2 actual errors.  Why didn't you show us that SMART report?  The ones you did show us had no actual errors as far as I can tell.  In fact, none of the stats you presented looked bad but I think that you've left out some key ones.

Here's a bit of a clue, but incomplete:  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=49BE3893.7010101%40aei.mpg.de

As to your main point: that sounds unfortunate.  What does the Apple firmware update change?  Can you give us a reference?

On Linux, some notebook drives go to low power mode too frequently such that the drives wear out prematurely.  There is some drive setting that you can change to prevent this (but it needs to be set at each boot).  Perhaps that is similar to what you are concerned about. Here's one link:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695

Sorry that link isn't "live".  The stupid forum software's link inserter isn't working for me.  Grumble.

[HughR]

Some folks claim that this is a fix.  Looks like the Linux fix.  http://www.hardmac.com/news/2009/07/13/stop-the-beeps-with-the-7200-rpm-hard-disks-of-the-macbook-pr...

[tacosauce]

Hopefully this will help.  I had an online conversation with a tech at seagate where he/she gave me the info about the firmware and seagate's stance on it.  
 
As for all the Apple people, the main discussion thread is :http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2049659&start=0&tstart=0
Here is where I got the info for the Apple firmware:  http://support.apple.com/downloads/Hard_Drive_Firmware_Update_2_0
If you try to apply the updated firmware without having the Apple firmware on the drive, it wont let you.  Currently I have firmware version: 0002SDM1
Apple is horrible about disclosing any details of their updates, so likewise, this update is very vague. I wish there was a way to force an update.  I tried extracting the firmware updater from the installer package, but not only does the installer package check the firmware before installing the updater, but the updater double checks the current firmware before continuing.
 
Here is my smart info with headers in a code block, sorry about that.  I was mistaken on the number of raw-read-error-rate, it's in the hundreds of millions and climbs steadily with each run the smartctl.  It's alarming because the number is climbing steadily on a 1 month old drive.  On my 10 month old drive that was working and replaced by the 500gb, there were no raw errors whatsoever, although the load cycle count seemed high at somewhere around 150k.

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   111   099   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       36984705
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   100   099   085    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       94
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   069   060   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       9377755
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       356
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   037   020    Old_age   Always       -       82
184 Unknown_Attribute       0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Unknown_Attribute       0x0032   100   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       4
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   058   056   045    Old_age   Always       -       42 (Lifetime Min/Max 30/42)
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   095   095   000    Old_age   Always       -       11336
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   042   044   000    Old_age   Always       -       42 (0 20 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   047   040   000    Old_age   Always       -       36984705
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       8203387535671
241 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       1507067261
242 Unknown_Attribute       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       749646730
254 Unknown_Attribute       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

 

[HughR]

tacosauce

It is annoying that "code" does not use a fixed-pitch font.  If it did, these tables would line up properly.  Still, this presentation is better than the previous one.  (I also copied it to an xterm window with a fixed pitch font; that helped more.)

 Your disk has been on 356 hours (attribute 9).  You've turned your system on 80 times (attribute 12).  There were 11336 load cycles (attribute 193).

Since the average length of you session is  4.45 hours, I bet that you are not actually using it for a fair amount of time in which it is on.

On average, your disk load-cycles every two minutes.  But this is actually probably more frequent while you are actually using the machine.  That seems like a lot.  So it seems that you are experiencing the problem I mentioned.  Consider trying the fix described in the link I posted in the second message.

I don't see any other stats that concerns me.  I don't know what attributes 241 and 242 are.  254 is Number of "Free Fall Events" detected according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

Message Edited by HughR on 2009-08-25 10:33 PM