Seagate Momentus XT SD25 firmware update coming this week

Seagate has a new firmware code (SD25) that has been in testing in the field for about two weeks.  The verdict is in from the folks to whom Seagate shipped the new SD25 firmware code for Momentus XT.  Seagate collected tons of feedback and input from Momentus XT users that has been invaluable in helping Seagate diagnose and address any issues.  Here is a quick look at the feedback and input received with respect to the SD25 firmware code:

  • “…it is really refreshing to see such personal support from Seagate to their customers. Not seen customer service like that for a long time! “
  • “The last time I experienced support like this was around 8 years ago with ATI’s presence on Rage 3D’s forums.”
  • “I think you did it Seagate support team!”
  • “Keep the excellent work!”
  • “And I just wanted to say thanks for the great customer support!  I am really impressed with Seagate.  I have been a WD guy, but I think I will be a Seagate convert from now on.”
  • “I’m happy to be of assistance and appreciate you folks getting behind your product like this.” 🙂

The positive feedback is great to hear, yet it will not distract from the real goal which is to correct the issue.The new SD25 firmware code will be released this week…stay tuned.

Thanks for everyone’s patience, and the invaluable aid of our customer activity on the forum, blogs, and Twitter.

Related Posts:

Momentus XT and the power of community
Momentus XT and the MacBook Pro…what’s Seagate doing?
Momentus XT and MacBooks: what’s the latest from Seagate?

 

2011-03-29T06:30:11+00:00

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35 Comments

  1. Ann Honey Moss March 29, 2011 at 7:04 am - Reply

    I just put a hybrid in my mini. I had originally put in an SSD, but it died less than 90 days after installation. I don’t think the SSD is ready for shipping. How can I tune this to work better in my mini. It seems to be not much more than a 7200 right now.

    thanks.

    • Mark Wojtasiak March 29, 2011 at 9:02 am - Reply

      @Ann Honey Moss Hi Ann – have you rebooted your mini a few times? The Momentus XT’s Adaptive Memory technology will learn how you use the mini. After a few boots, it will perform faster and faster. We currently do not offer any tuning capabilities with Momentus XT…the drive does everything on its own, but good feedback! Hope this helps – Mark.

  2. Shon March 29, 2011 at 12:52 pm - Reply

    @Mark: if the Momentus optimizes itself during boot, that may be a reason Mac users are seeing lower performance. I have one in my MBP and have been seeing poor performance (on SD23 and SD24) but I didn’t know about the optimization-at-boot thing. As a practice, my mac almost never reboots.

    In general modern Macs don’t tend to reboot much. I see uptimes of 18-25 days or more on my MBP and if it does reboot it’s normally due to running the battery till its dead. My quad-core Windows 7 Ultimate box reboots more frequently on it’s own due to MS pushing updates which require reboot. But I don’t have this drive in that system so I can’t comment.

    If rebooting is part of the optimization process of the device then I’d publish that info loudly and clearly to the mac community.

  3. Moe March 30, 2011 at 12:59 am - Reply

    I hope that you don’t fix mac errors only?
    It feels like the normal drives in a mac must have been a slow and silent one, because compared to my 80GB, 250GB 320GB 2,5″ 7200RPM Hitachi and WD drives the XT drive is very silent. Some drives whine more others vibrate during read, but the xt doesn’t do any thing of that yet mac people complain about noise.. so what? 7200″ is louder than a 4200″…
    Both XT’s make a small noise when they are idlle for a long time, bip bip… no matter if you run ubuntu 10.10 or windows 7 thus it should be something withthin SD24 that causes that.

  4. Steve March 31, 2011 at 10:12 am - Reply

    I installed SD25 this morning. So far so good.

    No more beeping.. no more disk stopping and starting back up.. and my macbook pro can fully sleep again.

    Thanks guys!

    Heard such good things about this drive and my friend has been using one without problems for 6 months now. I get one and instantly have these problems.

    Glad to see it solved and very happy with the performance of this drive.

    Coming from a full 120 gig SSD on my last macbook pro, I can’t really say I see any HD performance loss now vs the stock 7200 rpm drive it came with.

    • Mark Wojtasiak April 4, 2011 at 6:54 am - Reply

      @Steve Thanks for sticking with us and the great feedback Steve!

  5. Brian Beeler April 1, 2011 at 5:15 am - Reply

    We wrote up a mini-review of SD24, comparing the benchmarks from our first review to the new benchmarks with SD24. As soon as the final build of SD25 is complete, we’ll do another comparison with all three.

    http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_momentus_xt_sd24_firmware_update

  6. jonathan April 2, 2011 at 6:03 am - Reply

    I hope this fixes my problems with my momentus xt freezing. I have never seen any performance boost compared to a regular drive. The main issue is I can’t upgrade the firmware since on the boot (iso or from exe) it doesn’t detect my drive and therefore doesn’t install the hardware(and yes, my bios does detect the drive).

    I’m at a complete loss and have no luck with Seagate support. I last heard that a manager has to call me to walk me through some kind of special way to upgrade the firmware in this situation.

    • Mark Wojtasiak April 4, 2011 at 6:52 am - Reply

      @Jonathan Sorry to hear this Jonathan. Have you tried the Seagate forums (forums.seagate.com)? There is a lot of information from users like you that may have a fix. In the meantime, I will see what I can do to expedite a reponse and/or solution for you. Thanks, Mark.

  7. Paul C April 4, 2011 at 5:49 pm - Reply

    Well, if it ain’t broke…my 500G drive was fine. Fully patched Win XP. Took the firmware update, why, I still have no idea, and everything was fine. At least until I unplugged the pc. Now, after actually cutting power to the PC, a cold boot, it hiccups. I can hear the drive reinitialize every few seconds. Can I downgrade?!?!

  8. TWT April 11, 2011 at 1:22 pm - Reply

    I’ve had problems for weeks and updated to SD25 and guess what…
    I still have horrible video stutter that makes the machine unusable.
    I really think Seagate needs to recall these darn things.

    • Mark Wojtasiak April 11, 2011 at 1:44 pm - Reply

      @TWT Hi TWT – I am sorry to hear that. Please let me know some specifics…type of system / OS version, etc. I will escalate through the support team. Thanks – Mark

  9. George April 18, 2011 at 11:45 am - Reply

    Should I give it a last chance ? I had two in RAID 0 configuration on an X58/ICH10R (Award BIOS) and sometimes they froze the system for up to 10 seconds. Unusable – so I threw them out. Maybe I’ll try the SD25 on a non-production machine if I have time …

  10. […] on geeknewscentral.com caught my eye.  Probably because of all the activity around Momentus XT and upgrading MacBook Pro […]

  11. Drew April 25, 2011 at 3:04 pm - Reply

    Mark,

    I am using a Macbook Pro 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8gb of ram the the Momentus XT 500gb drive.

    I did not know about the problems with the drive until 2 weeks ago when I mentioned to a friend that my hard-drive kept spinning when editing photos. I had never heard the “beep” problem.

    I updated the SD25 and now have the “beep” along with the same spinning beach ball. Also, the computer gets hot when in sleep.

    I will have to take the drive out tomorrow and replace it because I can not continue to work on deadlines like this. I think the product has great potential, but needs to be re-worked. Thank You!

  12. […] XT (SD 25) like its predecessor SD24 cleaned up some annoyances and improved on overall stability. Here is a Seagate post by Mark Wojtasiak discussing SD25 and feedback obtained via the Momentus XT forum […]

  13. greg schulz May 3, 2011 at 3:24 pm - Reply

    Mark SD25 continues to improve and make the XTs better and better…

    Cheers
    gs

  14. […] XT (SD 25) like its predecessor SD24 cleaned up some annoyances and improved on overall stability. Here is a Seagate post by Mark Wojtasiak discussing SD25 and feedback obtained via the Momentus XT forum […]

  15. NDPTAL85 May 29, 2011 at 4:34 pm - Reply

    Can the ISO updater be used on/with Macs?

    • Mark Wojtasiak May 31, 2011 at 10:43 am - Reply

      @NDPTAL85 Hi – this is what I was able to find out….The ISO.image posted is used to create/burn a CDROM which is bootable, and will proceed to run FDL to flash a drive, and Yes, it’s known to work as reported form several MAC forum users. Hope this helps. Thanks – Mark.

  16. NDPTAL85 May 30, 2011 at 10:08 pm - Reply

    Also, is enabling Snow Leopard’s TRIM support recommended for using these drives?

    Thanks

    • Mark Wojtasiak May 31, 2011 at 6:52 am - Reply

      @NDPTAL85 Hi – TRIM support is not needed for Momentus XT because the system will not see the SSD portion of the drive. To the Mac, the Momentus XT just looks like a hard drive. The use of the SSD is completely handled by the drive itself – independent of the OS. Thanks – Mark

  17. NDPTAL85 June 4, 2011 at 10:25 am - Reply

    So I bought two, one for my 2006 Mac Mini and one for my 2007 MacBook. I have both installed. I was pleasantly surprised to find they bought came with SD26 pre-installed. I didn’t even know SD26 was out. I am enjoying the speed boost they are providing me with and will put them through their paces. As I am well aware of the issues with these drives I have beefed up my already extensive backup system by simply not erasing the drives I removed from the Macs to replace the hybrid drives with.

  18. […] XT (SD 25) like its predecessor SD24 cleaned up some annoyances and improved on overall stability. Here is a Seagate post by Mark Wojtasiak discussing SD25 and feedback obtained via the Momentus XT forum […]

  19. Jeff July 18, 2011 at 2:46 pm - Reply

    So is it safe to say that the whole incompatibility issue with Macbook Pros is history and consumers can try out the XT without fear?

    Cheers.

  20. othoap July 20, 2011 at 1:47 pm - Reply

    My momentus xt 500gb will not reliably boot. I’ve give up and would like an exchange please.

  21. Ron July 27, 2011 at 4:59 pm - Reply

    Mark,

    I see now SD26 is now out…is there a change log with the improvements over SD25?

  22. greg schulz August 13, 2011 at 10:26 am - Reply

    Mark happy to report that while SD25 greatly improved the stability of my HHDDs, now that all systems are migrated to Windows 7, they have been flawless! So much so that I just added yet another Momentus XT (500GB) upgrading an older, slower and lower capacity HDD to something faster.

    Also for those who are interested in Windows boot performance impact, here ( http://storageioblog.com/?p=2041 ) is a recent post that contains links ( http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/blog/?p=12048
    ) to some testing I did on Windows boot performance (useful for VDI planning) including how the HHDD reduced both read and write latency during boot.

    Hope all is well.

    Cheers
    gs

    • Mark Wojtasiak August 15, 2011 at 8:05 am - Reply

      @ greg schulz Thanks Greg! Great post and thanks for the feedback and extra info on how Momentus XT has worked out for you. – Mark

  23. James Parker February 19, 2012 at 6:32 pm - Reply

    I have a MomentusXT 500g running on an ASUS M5A88-M mb and Win XP. This machine takes anywhere from 5=10 minutes to boot. When trying to run a defrag through Norton Utilities or System Mechanic I get error messages that this may damage the SSD drive. The drive really needs a defrag, how do I do it without harming the SSD?

  24. mychak April 1, 2012 at 8:47 pm - Reply

    hi mark, I have a question for you. I have a lenovo t520 thinkpad,the harddrive is dead and i was thinking about replacing it with the seagate momentus xt stan500100. IS it compatible with my lenovo t510? And does it have all the firmware updates? Or do i need to update the latest firmware? And if i need to update the firmware where do i need to go/do to do this? i just dont want to have the problems that some of the other people have had using momentus xt. Any info would be a great help and appreciated. I just want to make sure it will work before i buy it and install it,i just do want to waste my time and money on a product that will discombobulate my laptop with a bunch of problems. Thank you,Mark and have a blessed day.

    • Mark Wojtasiak April 2, 2012 at 2:36 pm - Reply

      @mychak Hi Mychak – The Momentus XT 500GB has been replaced with a new 750GB model. Both the Seagate Community Forum and the Lenovo Forum have posted some challenges with the original Momentus XT 500GB, but those date back to 2010 as far as I could see. Any issues would have been solved by a firmware update. (http://forums.seagate.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?q=momentus+xt+lenovo). I would go with the latest 750GB model if possible. The 2nd generation takes everything we learned from the 1st gen, and we made it better: Model # ST750LX003. If your heart is set on the 500GB, it should have the latest firmware already on it, but you will want to check to be sure. For more info on checking and updating the firmware go here: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/215451en. I hope this helps! Thanks, Woj.

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