Seagate executives had high hopes for the success of their Momentus XT hybrid storage drives when the product hit the market last July. Unfortunately, some who have purchased the drive, which was billed as the “world’s fastest 2.5-inch hard drive,” have experienced nothing but frustration thus far.
Owners of the Momentus XT, which is dubbed “hybrid” for combining traditional HDD and SSD technologies, have reported frequent lagging, lock-ups, and beeping noises which have been attributed to the drive’s Advanced Power Management (APM) system. The purpose of the APM is to spin down the drive when not in use to lessen wear, increase the life span, and reduce the power consumption of the device.
Darren Dittrich, owner of four 500GB Momentus XT hybrids, purchased and ran a SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) utility on his drives after experiencing poor performance with each. The utility reported that just one of the drives had spun down and up 65,535 times in just one month of use.
Seagate has released a firmware upgrade to deal with the APM system issues, but Dittrich claims that even after updating, he is still having issues to the point that his hybrid performance is still worse than the traditional HDD it replaced.
"[The remaining issues] are temporary and bearable, but very annoying for me, even more difficult for some folks on the forums ,” Dittrich told Computerworld. "I only have experience on the Mac side of the house, but there are plenty of PC users out there as well, who are experiencing spin-down/up, drive stalls, and the like."
"Most of these anomalies have already been resolved by the current SD24 firmware upgrade located on the Seagate support forum or through our technical support team," a Seagate spokesman said. "The few remaining concerns include beeping sounds, no spin down in power saving modes and intermittent hangs, most notably on MacBook Pro systems. Seagate remains focused on resolving these issues as well."
Hopefully the company is able to figure out what is causing the Momentus XT hybrid’s performance degradation soon. I, as a consumer, would be incredibly frustrated if I had bought one of these drive’s for the touted speed and found out that an unresolved issue was caused persistent lagging and beeping.
