Hybrid SSD drive - anyone tried it?

[SaabScott]

I've been doing some looking into upgrading my T61p lately after installing Windows 7 (love it btw).

I read through some of the hard drive threads, but I didn't find anyone who had installed the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives.

Has anyone got any real life feedback on them?


http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... TMD-500AS4

[Bigdaddychud]

I installed a Momentus XT last week and I Love it. I upgraded to Win 7 pro at the same time and my T60 is much faster. The only issue I had was I had to change my HDD controller settings in the Bios to "Compatibility" mode before it the machine would recognize it. It was a very good purchase in my opinion and makes me happy to use my laptop again

[alkemyst]

My brother's wife has one on a newer thinkpad (T500 I believe).

It was very noticeable.

I am about to install a 500GB on a client's Inspiron 1521 tomorrow.

[RealBlackStuff]

check with forum member FredGarvin, he's got one.

[SaabScott]

check with forum member FredGarvin, he's got one.

PM'd him ... no response.

Has anyone else done this before?

[Franasia]

Here's a couple of reviews on it:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seag ... hybrid-hdd

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sea ... ,2638.html

[Worzyl]

I have 250GB MXT installed. No problems so far and a great harddrive to have. I think I should of purchased the 320GB though....

[RealBlackStuff]

I always wonder about those big drives...
I have problems filling even half of a 40GB (in my laptops).

[IvanAndreevich]

I always wonder about those big drives...
I have problems filling even half of a 40GB (in my laptops).

Why not get a proper SSD then? Should be perfect for you.

[SaabScott]

I always wonder about those big drives...
I have problems filling even half of a 40GB (in my laptops).

lol ... I wish I had that problem!

Other than having gigs of music, etc that I can't have on my ThinkPad, I have about 50GB alone in WoW files.

My 100GB HDD is currently sitting with about 1.4GB free ... nowhere close to what it should be.

[mikemex]

I always wonder about those big drives...
I have problems filling even half of a 40GB (in my laptops).

In my house we have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) with 2x1TB hard drives in RAID 1. Since I started putting non-critical stuff over there I realized I didn't need to have large hard drives on any of my machines, so I simply did what Ivan suggests and bought some small 64GB SSDs and been happy since.

Right now I have 38GB of free space on my X61 and I have no idea of what I could put in there to fill it. There is Internet almost everywhere I go and speed is usually fast enough to access stuff from the NAS on the go, so I don't really have a need to keep things on the laptop itself. Besides, if the laptop breaks or gets stolen, there is little to worry about. I would worry much more with a 500GB drive full of important stuff.

[Worzyl]

I used to have a 100GB. Before that it was a 40GB in my Toshiba. Animation files (especially when containing the models) just get huge and was slowing everything down, heating up my laptop along with the fan going crazy until the eventual shutdown. Lost one too many files for my liking.....

[rs79]

These Segate momentus drives came out in May 2010 for 130 and can now be had for $69 on Amazon. I'd love to hear they utterly rawk, but the one person I know that tried them had this to say:

"It seemed like a great idea when it cost twice as much. Fast to boot, but then fast to bluescreen, fast to corrupt files, yes very fast indeed. From the reviews, it seems like a nice concept if you get one that works. I did not.

There's several complicated explanations about why it could be the OS's fault, you need a new driver, etc, etc. I was trying to speed up an old XP system with a large but 4200 RPM drive, and a 500G hard drive with a SSD cache seemed like a reason to try Seagate.

Oh yes, it also was remarkably quiet and stopped the HDD with a will of its own. Sometime you would get 15 second freezes when its algorithm guessed wrong.

In the end a 500G 7200 drive from Hitachi produced a modest speedup and a reliable file system."

It would be tempting to suggest this fellow isn't technical he actually invented the Internet domain name system in the 1980s.

I'd love to hear Paul's problem was isolated and that everybody else had flawless behavior with them.

[Mike Blake]

That was Paul Mockapetris, I presume?

Anyway, earlier in the thread I see Bigdaddychud got his to run this way:

'The only issue I had was I had to change my HDD controller
settings in the Bios to "Compatibility" mode before it the
machine would recognize it.'

Wow, it used to be that hard drives running in compatibility mode were a problem to be fixed, not the solution for an issue. But I guess it's working OK for him.

[Kamika007z]

I have used this drive, but then soon after, upgraded my T61 to an ssd (vertex 2).

The drive ran great, however do NOT install the ThinkVantage toolbox (new version of PC-Doctor). It had been known to screw up your Windows installation often. Even when the application had been removed from start up, Windows ran to a crawl.

This was back a few months ago, so the issue may have been resolved since then.

I suggest reading Seagate's forums regarding this drive for additional info from users.

FWIW, my Win 7 x64 score for my drive got a 5.9 rating.

Also, I recommend not running any newer gen sata drive under compatibility mode. It doesn't end up using features such as NCQ. If you look around, there should be help online on how to get it back to AHCI mode.

Hope this helps!

[SaabScott]

Just picked up this drive.
Going to start the Windows install this afternoon and let it run while I am out this evening.

Fingers are crossed!

And thanks for all of the comments and tips to this point.

[Mike Blake]

Just picked up this drive.
Going to start the Windows install this afternoon and let it run while I am out this evening.

Fingers are crossed!

And thanks for all of the comments and tips to this point.

Good luck! Keep us posted...

[miamicanes]

Personally, it blows my mind that literally *nobody* has yet made what I consider to be a painfully-obvious product for laptops: a 250-320-gig 7200rpm drive with full-blown 80-120gig SSD on the controller board that simply appears to be a pair of independent SATA drives, for roughly the same price as a pair of such drives purchased separately. Or, worst-case, a ~160-gig 1.8" drive + 80-120gig SSD with the form factor of a 2.5" 9.5mm hard drive. I know the interface would have been electronically trivial to implement with PATA (by making the SSD master & spinnning-platter drive slave, and just writing off the few freakish edge cases where the mfr used a single IDE channel for both the hard drive and optical drive), and assume there's some equivalent way to pull it off with a single SATA connector (even if it's never really been done, and nobody ever really expected a non-theoretical drive to ever do it in practice).

I suspect it's probably due to the same reason why Polaroid just couldn't bring itself to ever make a digital camera with ability to do simple crop/edit/gamma editing and output an image to traditional Polaroid film -- the companies on the cutting edge of SSD aren't the same companies on the cutting edge of cheap giga/terrabytes of fast hard drive space, and the traditional market leaders are still kind of in denial/panic. Or, they just don't want to work hand in hand with what they probably see as bratty intruders into their market like OCZ, Patriot, Kingston, Sandisk, etc.

[SaabScott]

Good luck! Keep us posted...

I thought everything was going well.
Completed the Windows install yesterday before leaving ... set the machine to update a few things while I was out.
Came back and it was done.
Great.
Proceeded to install MS Office and a couple other things.
All is good.

Needed to access stuff I haven't yet ported, so shut down, swapped the original drive back in, all good.

Put the new drive back in to start installing other things ... all I get is chirping from the drive and it is hung on the ThinkPad screen right at the beginning!

Any thoughts?


Oh, and yes, I upgraded the firmware ... no issue doing that.
btw, between last night and this morning, several reboots were done just fine.

[RealBlackStuff]

If you still can, return that HD for a refund.
Seagate seems to be spiraling down with bad quality hard drives.
Just look at the Seagate forum, and start pulling your hair out: http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-X ... p/Momentus

[SaabScott]

If you still can, return that HD for a refund.
Seagate seems to be spiraling down with bad quality hard drives.
Just look at the Seagate forum, and start pulling your hair out: http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-X ... p/Momentus

Thanks for the advise ... just not the sort I was hoping for.
Based on a lot of reading I have done, it appears that the concept is a good one.

I'm looking to see if anyone elsewhere (Seagate forum and others) may have any advise for the drive I have.
Worst case, I guess I would have to return it, perhaps try another, or go with something different (any suggestion there???).

[SaabScott]

OK, I put it aside for a while ... too many other things going on.

Earlier this week I swapped out the 100GB and started working with the hybrid again.
All was going well ... until I had to use the other drive to get some settings and then went back to the hybrid.
It started making those lovely noises again on boot and wouldn't get past the main splash screen.

After trying this several times I did the unimagineable ...

I slammed my fist down on my ThinkPad where the hard drive is.

Well, while it is not a piece of technical advise I would give to anyone else, it worked!
The hard drive started fine and has been a dream ever since.
And to be honest, the difference in performance is noticeable.
Applications start much faster.
While not the best judge of things, World of Warcraft is now running smoother, frame rates are up while video quality has been increased.

I also went the extra step and pulled the keyboard off and gave the inside a vacuum.
I also vacuumed the cooling fins / fans from the outside.

Temps have dropped noticeably!

[Harryc]

Occasionally we get a 'fist slamming' story here and it usually does not end well. You got lucky.

[Brian10161]

hehe I have had that happen a few times. Smacking something usually makes me feel better, not what I'm working on though lol

I got a compressor in a rooftop running one time by giving it a little kick to help it along. I eventually had to change it, but it kept running for another season and made my customer happy hehe

But yah, you did get lucky

[DAH]

Hmm, I need to update my sig....

I've had one since they came out. No issues on mine at all, running windows 7 64 bit, in fact I was so pleased with it that I bought a second one. For me it works, it's fast, and it's quite.

[eyeland]

The obvious solution would seem to be installing a small/medium SSD for OS and anything else that benefits from the speed and perhaps put a hybrid drive in the ultrabay assuming that one doesn't need it badly for optical drive/battery.
I use my T61 for tethered DSLR shooting as well as Video capture and editing and at present I need both Speed, space and mobility.
My only concern with this solution is whether the ultrabay throughput is high enough on a t61 with or without the Bios modded to unlock Sata2 but that belongs to a different thread altogether

[garnet]

The obvious solution would seem to be installing a small/medium SSD for OS and anything else that benefits from the speed and perhaps put a hybrid drive in the ultrabay assuming that one doesn't need it badly for optical drive/battery.

I can confirm from experience this is the optimal solution.

My only concern with this solution is whether the ultrabay throughput is high enough on a t61 with or without the Bios modded to unlock Sata2 but that belongs to a different thread altogether

As far I as know (on T60 at least) the ultrabay is PATA interface. If it goes the same for t61, I am not sure. Check it, but on PATA to SATA caddy I get ~50 MB/s transfer between SSD and HDD. Thats enough for everything.

[crashnburn]

I am thinking of getting one of these.. 500 GB Momentus XT anyone?

[Worzyl]

I am thinking of getting one of these.. 500 GB Momentus XT anyone?

DO ETT!!! DO ET NOW! (in an Arnold Schwarzenegger like voice)

[jdrou]

I've got the 500GB XT in my Precision M4400. Haven't seen any problems and it is noticably faster than the 500GB 7200rpm 'normal' Seagate drive it replaced. I did update the firmware a while back even though I hadn't noticed any problems after reading all the stories on the Seagate forum. With a 15" laptop where you have the option I can certainly see going with an SSD boot drive and a big traditional drive in the modular bay but where it would really be useful is in the no-optical-drive ultraportables if an SSD is not big enough. If they release a higher-capacity hybrid in the near future I'll probably migrate the 500GB to my X201 (or X220 if I decide to get it).