[TSullivan]

Almost a year ago we reviewed the first hybrid SSD/HDD (well, first in a long time); the Seagate Momentus XT. Since that time it has remained the one and only drive in the hybrid drive category and gained a ton of popularity in the enthusiast market. While offering a very good mixture of performance and capacity, which can be crucial in single drive notebook configurations, there were limitations like fast spin-down times and the small cache size that many hoped would be fixed or improved. Today we look at the latest firmware patch, dubbed SD24 for the Momentus XT, which helps fixes this drive's most complained about flaw; lag associated with spinning down too quickly at idle.

Click for full article

[ed29a]

Any chance of seeing a Raid-0 benchmarks with these drives?

[dhanson865]

btw the Seagate forum users say the SD25 firmware fixes more issues and makes the drive faster, use less power, wash your windows, etcetera

It's in testing and will be released any day now but a PM to the seagate employee in the thread will get it emailed to you.

The block below is what I'm posting on SPCR assuming I don't find any more typos or change the grammar before I post it. I didn't bother putting two of the URLs in this pasted version (one points to the StorageReview article, the other to a very short document of changes in SD24.

Quote

Seagate Momentus XT SD24 Firmware Update improves performance, noise, changes spindown timing. Makes Seagate's Hybrid hard drive a better option than it was in the past. This firmware was released in December 2010 (over 3 months ago) so you may have already installed it. If not you should backup your data and consider installing the new firmware. If you have this drive and the new firmware didn't fix your issues see this thread. You can also read a Release Notes document but from the forum messages it appears more has changed than is documented there. Firmware SD25 is in the works (actually being tested by end users) but hasn't been released yet. Per this post you can send a PM to STX_NB (Seagate Employee) on their forum and he will email the SD25 firmware to you if you want it now before it is released.

This post has been edited by dhanson865: 22 March 2011 - 11:08 AM

[TSullivan]

Thanks for the info on SD25, although I think we will hold back until it is publicly released. The one area we are still looking at is RAID performance which almost looks to have dropped, although we were testing it through a different card yesterday playing around. I need to get the 9260 back in for benchmarking a new SSD that came in today, and will have some new vs old numbers to compare against soon.

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

Your numbers in MB/s in the gaming trace don't match the text and the numbers in other units - something seems wrong here.

MrS

[TSullivan]

[ETA]MrSpadge, on 22 March 2011 - 06:05 PM, said:

Your numbers in MB/s in the gaming trace don't match the text and the numbers in other units - something seems wrong here.

MrS

DOH, I just saw it... the IOps bars got swapped. Good catch.

[cbrworm]

I've deployed a handful of these drives and have updated the firmware on them to SD24. I think I started out with SD22 or SD23 which already had the spin-down disabled - or else my systems were just never idle long enough for them to stop. The update process was very easy.

I have had good luck with them, but to read the seagate support forums, it appears that a lot of people were unhappy with these drives. It's amazing how many complaints there are - some potentially valid, others persistant and ridiculous.

I never really saw the huge gains in normal usage, but my usage pattern may not be repeatable enough to cache effectively. I did see huge gains in benchmarks if I ran them repeatedly.

[TSullivan]

Well I guess thats one downside of the hybrid drives. If you surpass the cache amounts, its just about as fast as any other drive of similar speed, just 50% more expensive

[dhanson865]

SD25 went live on 03-30-2011

Not all issues were fixed and SD26 is under way.

Anyone wanting to track the issues should go to http://forums.seagat...heet/td-p/99676 as they closed the old threads.

[danwat1234]

The newest version of the drive's firmware, version SD26 is available on the web now.

Click on "Regular Download", the blue button, then click on the "Click here to start download from sendspace" hyperlink

Windows version (easiest):
http://www.sendspace.com/file/mhlkbf


Bootable iso version:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/rifiz5

This post has been edited by danwat1234: 25 August 2011 - 06:14 PM