Momentus XT

S

Silvers24

Gawd
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Oct 11, 2007
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I am thinking of picking one of these up...is seagate any good?
Is the drive itself really that good?
As it's either this or a WD black.

And the seagate seems to be much better then the black. Although for a lot more.

Input?
 
What kind of results are you looking for?
My buddy has one in his mbp, he "upgraded" from a wd black. I haven't heard him say he doesn't regret it.
 
Faster boot up, it's a lappy from 07....and I am looking for a faster...bigger HDD...and the momentus looks to be perfect...and besides that maybe a cpu upgrade and i won't need to buy a new laptop.
As it's used for light gaming and mainly heavy usage at school.
 
I was also thinking of getting a Seagate Momentus XT (for a OS boot drive) because its faster then most of the HDD's. BUT its a laptop drive!

Would it make any difference if i used it in a desktop computer?
 
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I was also thinking of getting a Seagate Momentus XT (for a OS boot drive) because its faster then most of the HDD's.
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I have 4 of these at work and I do not recommend them. I would certainly not use them in a desktop machine as they are slower than most desktop drives. They are not even noticeably faster than a normal 7200 RPM laptop drive.
 
thanks for the input, guess will have to get a SSD after all :D
 
I have one in my new T520, works great and fast. Make sure to upgrade the firmware.
SSD isn't an option for me in this laptop, they are too small and not reliable enough.
 
A coworker gave me one of these after writing up a review. I love it. It's a bit faster than my WD black 320GB drive. No problems what so ever with mine.
 
Darakian said:
A coworker gave me one of these after writing up a review. I love it. It's a bit faster than my WD black 320GB drive. No problems what so ever with mine.
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A 320GB drive isn't that fast, the platter density just isn't there. Try a 1TB-2TB Black drive, then you'll see real speed for a HDD. ;)

A momentus XT is an interesting design, it's basically a HDD with a 4GB cache. But it won't save the HDD portion of it from being overly slow.
 
A momentus XT is an interesting design, it's basically a HDD with a 4GB cache.
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Remember the cache is read only meaning you do not get any writing speed benefit from the drive. Also I see the drive as a hard drive with builtin USB stick providing some read performance benefit for the most read 4GB of data on your system.

But it won't save the HDD portion of it from being overly slow.
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Agreed it does not help the drive portion from being slow.
 
Red Falcon said:
A 320GB drive isn't that fast, the platter density just isn't there. Try a 1TB-2TB Black drive, then you'll see real speed for a HDD. ;)

A momentus XT is an interesting design, it's basically a HDD with a 4GB cache. But it won't save the HDD portion of it from being overly slow.
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Fair enough. But I can't stick a 1-2TB black drive in a laptop :)
 
I didn't realize the momentus XT's were only in 2.5" drives.

I'd like to see how it stacks up to a 1TB WD Scorpio Blue though.
 
BTW, I start talking badly about a drive then it dies.. This evening the Momentus XT in my work laptop has started acting up. It has Current Pending Sector Count > 0 and Uncorrectable Sector Count > 0 errors, windows 7 locked up three times with these and I was unable to get past 3% of a non destructive badblocks. Looks like I will try to make a copy of that to a spare XT tomorrow using ddrescue. Hopefully it will recover most of the disk. I have nothing important on it but it would be a pain to recover. However I guess I still have the original hard drive from the laptop around.

As always a single failure does not mean a thing in such a small number of drives..
 
If you have or are considering a Momentus XT, make sure you're up to date with the latest firmware (SD25) and you should be good to go.

It's not an actual SSD as we've all come to know and understand them, but in more situations than not the Momentus XT will run circles around any modern hard drive including VelociRaptors in some of the most basic hard drive benchmarks out there. StorageReview probably had the best overall review of them when they first came out; they should redo the testing given the SD25 firmware but they won't.

I've put 4 of them in client machines (3 Windows based laptops and 1 MacBook Pro) and all 4 clients haven't got anything bad to say... at least not so far (several months in now for each). In my own testing after the installation, the drives outperformed pretty much any other 7200 rpm hard drives including the Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black model I have myself and the Hitachi 7K500 500GB I also have around here someplace, and both of those are traditionally the fastest laptop hard drives you can get.

Once the Momentus XT has been used for a week or so, the Flash storage on it "populates" in the same respects as Superfetch does on Windows - it "learns" what's being accessed most often and caches those particular files. App startup is almost SSD-like for the most commonly used programs, practically instant once the pattern is learned.

I'd like one for myself but right now I've got better things to do with the ~$100 they cost. Will probably just jump to an actual SSD of some kind at some point in the near future; those refurb Corsair Force drives are pretty damned fast for the prices.

But the 4 clients are all positives so far, even in spite of some folks at the Seagate forums having nothing but bad luck with the Momentus XT. Can say that about most any product ever made, I suppose - some never have issues, but there's always a few that do.

And, as always, S.M.A.R.T. data and information is effectively useless, seriously. I have a shoebox full of drives with 100% clean S.M.A.R.T. status yet each drive fails the manufacturer's diagnostics and can't be trusted.

Use the manufacturer's diagnostic to get the actual condition on the drive and no other tools - for Seagate that's SeaTools - that's the only tool that matters, and not one other. If that one says the drive is toast or it's on the way out, that's info you can rely on and make use of for an RMA on the hardware.
 
Once the Momentus XT has been used for a week or so, the Flash storage on it "populates" in the same respects as Superfetch does on Windows - it "learns" what's being accessed most often and caches those particular files. App startup is almost SSD-like for the most commonly used programs, practically instant once the pattern is learned.
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The problem is I am not seeing this on any of the Momentus XT drives that I have. Nothing useful seems to be in the cache. And yes I am running the latest SD25 firmware.


Momentus XT will run circles around any modern hard drive including VelociRaptors in some of the most basic hard drive benchmarks out there.
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That is where I think the only benefit of the 4GB cache lies. In benchmarks. However maybe my usage pattern does not work well with the drive..
 
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