Finally, I upgraded the harddisk of my 15″ MacBook Pro Unibody (late 2008) to a 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT solid state hybrid hdd. At first I hesitated because of the various reports about vibrations and heat issues. Eventually the moment arrived when I ran out of free space on my original 250 GB Hitachi drive and it left me no choice. As I was already using Squeezer which saved me a considerable amount of GBs and I couldn’t free any more space.

Pick a hdd

After reading a lot about different drives I came to choose between the WD Scorpio Blue 640 GB (WD6400BEVT) and the Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB (ST95005620AS). The Momentus XT has a few GB less capacity but the advantage of the 4 GB flash storage should give it a good advantage in speed. It’s still a lot cheaper  than any  80 GB pure SSD drive. Won’t even consider the ridiculously expensive 160-256 GB SSDs.

Got the Seagate Momentus XT at a local store for $150, went straight back home and swapped the drive of my MacBook Pro.

Installation

Swapping the drives was easy, just open the lid, unscrew the brackets, put ‘em onto the new drive, slip it into the hdd bay and close everything back up.

A fresh installation of Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 took less than 30 mins. During installation he remaining time displayed acted like those crazy countdowns in Futurama.

My Time Capsule held the latest backup and the complete restore took another 4h via a wired connection. Damn. TowerMadness on my iPhone helped to pass the time. (Get TM Zero if you don’t want to pay for it.)

Post-treatment

The restore did its job as expected and almost everything was back to normal. Even Safari’s history started right where I left off before the swap but Safari lost all of its extensions. A couple of other apps had to be reconfigured as well but overall no major issues encountered and the additional reconfiguration took only a few minutes.

Momentus XT

The integrated 4 GB flash storage is used as a read-cache for the most requested sectors and is managed through the drive’s logic. No OS or S-ATA controller will ever know about this or will have any compatibility issues. Seagate says that even in the event of a failure of the flash part of the drive will continue operation as a regular 7200 rpm hdd.

Seagate did a great job with this drive. Mine already came with the latest firmware revision SD23 addressing some spin down/power management issues. It’s fast and quiet and doesn’t heat up much during normal operation (37°C/98°F). I have to admit that it creates noticable vibrations of the Unibody though it’s mounted in a dampening frame. It doesn’t emit much noise but vibrations.

You won’t hear it even in a quiet room, but when resting your palm on the MacBook – like now while I’m typing this – you can feel the vibrations. Depending on the surface you put it onto it may also transfer those vibrations to the table and thus making them audible.

Haven’t had this issue yet on my desk but when in bed I sometimes use the MacBook as sleep timer/alarm clock and there I can now hear/feel a slight humming from it which wasn’t there with the stock drive. Actually the original Hitachi drive was virtually inaudible – was a great drive with bad performace.

I can also confirm the slight increase in power consumption. My battery life timer dropped about 20 mins but the increase of performance surely will more than compensate for this.

Performance

Speaking of which, the most interesting feature of the Seagate Momentus XT drive would be its performance. I haven’t done any explicit benchmarking yet but it feels a lot faster than any drive I’ve tested so far – haven’t tested any SSDs yet, just 5400/7200/10000 rpm drives.

An OS X reboot completes in less than a minute now – took about 4 mins before! Yes, I know thats a long time but I have a lot of startup items that fire up after login.

Dashboard with 16 widgets initializes within a few secs, compared to 30-40s before.

iTunes scrolls almost fluently through the 900+ apps section, so does iPhoto with thousands of photos.

All the apps you use regularly fire up within seconds compared to up to 1+ minute before. Smaller apps snap open almost instantly e.g. iCal and Address Book.

My verdict

It’s worth the fairly small surcharge over a regular 500-640 GB 7200rpm hdd and even a better deal compared to any SSD. The performance is great and saves a lot of time you’d otherwise spend watching the BBOD. Even though I am very sensitive to any noise coming from my computers I still don’t regret buying it.

So get one!

Links

• Seagate product page
• Seagate firmware check

Related products