Posted on Monday, February 21 2011 @ 16:59 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
ComputerWorld
reports users of Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid drive are suffering from a couple of issues. The disk combines SSD technology with a traditional hard drive to deliver more performance at a relatively low price, but users complain a defect in the Advanced Power Management (APM) feature causes the drive to pause frequently, freeze up and beep a lot. Seagate has attempted to fix the problems with firmware updates but some of the issues remain unsolved.
Much of the problem involves a Momentus XT feature called Advanced Power Management (APM), which automatically spins down the hard disk to manage power use and increase mechanical life span. The feature also allows the SSD to take over read requests and serve up the most frequently used data. Users on Seagate's online forum say the problem is that the spin-down feature is too aggressive.
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Seagate said it released a firmware upgrade for the Momentus XT, Version SD24, to address its aggressive APM tool. Dittrich said he installed the firmware upgrade and found that it addressed the frequency of spin-downs, but the drive is still slower than the native hard drive that came with the MacBook and he's still suffering from "odd lagging, and mysterious slowdowns."
