Hybrid HDD/SSD in T400?

[wujstefan]

My dad's gonna change his 160Gb 7200rpm SATA into something bigger AND faster. SSD in reasonable size cost an arm and a leg. Did anyone tried an invention of Seagate called Momentus XT? I've read some reviews and the opinion is they are somewhere in the middle between SSD and HDD, and the price is really reasonable (less than $130 for a 500Gb 7200rpm 32mb cache drive!) The only thing is wheather they work properly on T400 or not.

[Q-Ball]

Don't see why the Momentus XT won't work.
500 GB for 100 bucks isn't all that unreasonable and the 4GB of memory sweetens the deal quite a bit, and to top it all off, APS.

Just make sure to do a clean install (don't bother cloning the OS).

Also, to realize the full speed of the XT you'll have to do a few boots since the drive 'learns' as you use it- so the boot times are closer to an SSD than they are an HDD.


Also, what size is 'reasonable' for this application? Is the 160GB being outgrown or is it just time for an upgrade?

[wujstefan]

It's just an upgrade.

I will do the swap in a few days and share my experience. Seems a nice option, both in performance boost and $.

[wujstefan]

The swap mentioned was done much faster than expected - I borrowed a 500Gb + 4Gb SSD Seagate Momentus XT from a friend. It took me ~8hrs of tests, and I must say:
THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH HYBRID ON T400

I have no idea wheather it is notebook or HDD/SSD issue.

Anyway, installed a XP pro sp3 from MSDNAA - first boot wasn't what I've expected. 45 sec is pretty much I must say. But all the fun started when it actually came to 2nd boot. 19secs? Great! At 6th boot time was abnormal 50 secs. A minimum time of 14 secs was archieved at 8th boot, but a 10th one ended... with a blue screen! After a total of 50 boots only one ended up with a blue screen, 2 freezes and 2 longer lags at startup. Not to mention 5 times the whole process took more than 60 secs.

Reinstalled the system. Still, 50 boots, 2 blue screens, a few lags/freezes/crashes and a few REALLY long boot.

Installed a Win7. The speed actually was extreme - great boot times, nice copying rates etc, except for that while testing for about 1,5 hour the system has crashed 3 times.

Did anyone faced the same problem?

[Colonel O'Neill]

Does the original drive work?

Is the drive firmware up to date? Could it just be bad NAND or the controller serving the wrong sectors to the wrong requests?

[penartur]

A minimum time of 14 secs was archieved at 8th boot, but a 10th one ended... with a blue screen! After a total of 50 boots only one ended up with a blue screen, 2 freezes and 2 longer lags at startup. Not to mention 5 times the whole process took more than 60 secs.

Reinstalled the system. Still, 50 boots, 2 blue screens, a few lags/freezes/crashes and a few REALLY long boot.

Installed a Win7. The speed actually was extreme - great boot times, nice copying rates etc, except for that while testing for about 1,5 hour the system has crashed 3 times.

Did you wrote down that BSOD messages? It would help a lot in finding the root of the problem.

[wujstefan]

Well, must say I did not.

The original drive works okay, the firmware is up-to-date. The owner of the drive informed me he has the same issue on his T60 - so we need another hybrid drive to get sure what is wrong.

[Colonel O'Neill]

You can find dumps in C:\Windows\minidumps most of the time.

Lots of the reviews on Newegg say the drive causes freezing/crashes/lockups/stuttering/etc.

Personally:
500GB Scorpio Black: $79.99
16GB Class 10 SD card: $29.97
eBoostr laptop edition: $29.99 (no RAM cache, but has everything else)
Adds up to ~$140

Worth more than a $120 Momentus XT with 4GB of NAND:
- You can choose what gets cached and what doesn't.
- You can defrag the drive normally.
- The SD card is expandable, and can be replaced in case it fails.
- The platter drive is also expandable.
- None of the freezing symptoms.
- You can use the SD card when you need to (have to rebuild the entire cache after).

What it doesn't do:
- Complete transparency to the user/system
- Speed up very early parts of boot
- Cache writes
- Leave your SD card slot free