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.
After buttoning up the laptop, I put my old drive into an external FW800 drive, and booted from the now external drive.
Finally, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old drive (now behind FireWire) to the new SSD.
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