Tag Archives: Seagate

Out with the Hybrid, in with the SSD

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A few months back  (OK, 6 months) I bought a Seagate Momentus XT for my unibody MacBook Pro. The theory of operations is great: Add 4GB of NAND Flash to a good 7200rpm hard drive, and cache the slow seeks. Slow thrashy reboots and application launches get cached, giving you SSD-like read speeds on some things, for a small premium over similar sized laptop drives.

That’s the theory, anyhow, and it works. For a while. Many people reported issues, such as wake-from-sleep issues with many Macs, blue screens on Windows. Seagate’s forums are filled with threads and posts complaining about this drive, and they’ve issued new firmware, which has sometimes helped, sometimes hurt usability. Here’s an example: http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-and/SD24-Didn-t-Fix-Your-Issues/td-p/87250

I was completely fed up yesterday, beach balls of death. One time I had to reboot twice, the first reboot resulted in the international STOP symbol when the EFI couldn’t find a working boot drive.

I upgraded to SD25, and it seems to be a lot better. But my mind was made up. I ordered an Intel 320 Series SSD, 300GB.  They are selling out of stock quickly at Newegg, I got mine today and it’s already out of stock.

We’ll see if that satisfies me… hmmfff…

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Edited April 16, 2011

Installed it a couple of days ago.

First, remove the old drive, install the new drive.

 

Side by sideAfter buttoning up the laptop, I put my old drive into an external FW800 drive, and booted from the now external drive.

 

FireWire 800 external driveFinally, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old drive (now behind FireWire) to the new SSD.

Product Reviews Coming Soon: Hybrid Laptop Drive, DroboElite

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It’s my birthday and I’m playing with toys!

Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive

First, I just bought a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive. This drive adds 4GB of NAND Flash to act as an intelligent read cache to existing high density 500GB 7200 spindle-based technology.

I am very excited to be dropping this into my MacBook Pro, so I’ll need to pull together some basic benchmarks on my existing Western Digital Black 7200rpm drive so I can compare the “before vs. after”.

Data Robotics DroboElite iSCSI disk array

I’ve also taken the opportunity to evaluate the DroboElite.  If you haven’t heard, Data Robotics is running an evaluation program, where you can get your hands on the DroboElite for 30 days. Check it out here. This array supports multi-host iSCSI access, which makes it a potential player in offices where one may have more than one server. It’s also VMware certified… a big plus!

I’ve got about 4 weeks to take it for a spin in my environment, with a mix of hosts. It’s going to be tight, but I’ll post here as I check out its ease of use, performance and real world “care and feeding” overhead.