Monday, February 21, 2011

Momentus XT hybrid drive causing headaches, Seagate working to fix

All's not well in hybrid solid state storage land, as owners of Seagate's Momentus XT are facing serious issues with their drives -- despite glowing initial reviews, a number of long-term users claim that the drives chirp, crash, stutter, and freeze with alarming regularity, particularly when installed in a Mac. Seagate forumgoers speculate these are symptoms of the XT's magnetic platters spinning down inappropriately, due to an overzealous power management scheme. That's the bad news -- and it sounds pretty bad -- but the good news is this: Seagate's owning up to the issues, and is actively involved in getting them fixed. So far, a pair of new firmware updates have addressed some symptoms, a third is on the way, and a Seagate engineer known only as STX_NB is proactively chatting with affected customers about possible fixes. That's what we call technical support -- take notes, tech companies.

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