Momentus XT 750gb SSD HHD Hybrid Drive Compatibility

I have recently become very interested in this drive:
Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

I have an early 2008 2.4ghz core 2 duo macbook. Here are its specs:

I would like to know if it is compatible with my macbook so as to avoid restocking fees were it not to work.

If it is compatible, I would like to know these things:
1) How it will affect my battery life vs. the 5400rpm drive that came with my computer
2) Will it "cache" properly if I am switching between Lion OS X & Windows 7 using bootcamp? (Or will it have to relearn which programs to put on the SSD part every time I switch operating systems?)

Thanks for your feedback!

The drive is compatible with your MacBook. However, we've had several folks who have purchased hybrid drives and returned them. My personal recommendation is to buy a 7200 RPM standard drive for the machine. It will be less expensive and you won't notice the difference in speed.

chscag said:

The drive is compatible with your MacBook. However, we've had several folks who have purchased hybrid drives and returned them. My personal recommendation is to buy a 7200 RPM standard drive for the machine. It will be less expensive and you won't notice the difference in speed.

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Thanks for your input.... What 7200 RPM standard drive would you recommend that is 750+ gb?

I have the Momentus XT 750, recently installed. Mid 2009 13, works great. Soon they will add write caching to it for another bump in speed via firmware download. I just use OSX and the cache holds OS files and numerous frequently used Apps. For those it helps a ton. Cold boots in ~19 on Lion after some tweaks and a boot or two, with about 6 Apps and files loaded in 30 something seconds total, can start to work although the system is still settling down with its auto-maintenance behind the scenes. For the common Apps that are cached, everything loads in one bounce more or less. The rest of the time it's a 7200 with a larger than OE 5400 normal cache (32 vs 8).

For conventional there are some 1 TB 5400s that run like 7200s due to platter density. The issues many note were with early XTs, the first generation.

Overall it was a nice upgrade, esp combined with going from 4 => 8 gb main memory (less virtual memory swapping). The MBP feels much peppier in use. In my case with my work and programs I have about 5-6 gb of main memory being used, so this helped the puter quite a bit too.

I am not sure how it would do with dual booting, perhaps write Seagate or post in their forums. The present firmware pins certain OS files to the SSD cache so that they stay in place. You may have to decide what is the primary use of the puter. If you want killer speed all the time, you need a large $$ SSD.

Stanley said:

I have the Momentus XT 750, recently installed. Mid 2009 13, works great.

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Thanks for the more than adequate response!
How does your battery life seem compared to a standard 5400 rpm drive?
And is this drive very loud? Quiet? Any noticeable vibrations?

mt6272 said:

Thanks for the more than adequate response!
How does your battery life seem compared to a standard 5400 rpm drive?
And is this drive very loud? Quiet? Any noticeable vibrations?

Click to expand...

It is slightly louder and more "vibratey" than the stock 5400. Nothing major at all. The HD lives to the right of the touchpad on my MBP13, next to the disc drive. Battery life probably drops slightly but real world I am really not noticing an issue. Like if I go to a coffee shop and surf for a few hours I am not finding myself looking for an outlet. And my local shop is short on them! All the PC people rush to them…the Apple folks sit wherever.

You can get a bump in battery life if you go SSD and the system is lightly used. Remember that drives (of any kind) draw more current when under heavy use. So to figure out the battery life thing, well the average use would be a factor I would think. You can also set power management to help life…many folks run no sleep, no display dim, no HD sleep and so forth…in that case you'd gain life with some careful fine tuning.

BTW…my MBP13 used to run a "Negotiated Link Speed" of 1.5…it was nice to see that the HD install bumped this to the full 3 that SATA2 permits. The drive interface itself can to 6 Gigabits (SATA3) in case I move it to a newer Mac…

Hey I noticed some folks notice or dislike (or read about online and then notice and dislike ) that 7200 rpm hard drives are noisier and vibrate more than the stock 5400s. It's not that big a deal.

You can cut this down quite noticeably with some simple DIY efforts. I used some dynamat / roof patch sheet here and there. An example is shown below. Measured from the built-in mic and a metering app, I found this simple change helped by 3-8 dB (depending on frequency). That is significant. What is happening is that the aluminum unibody is acting like a sounding board driven by the vibes from the HD. The DIY panel dampening efforts deaden that energy. Some softer rubber pin mounts would help similarly. The HD floats in rubber bushings, four bushing pins in total. These are the screws that you exchange onto a new HD when you swap.

If you are running a 7200, try placing several fingers (not just the tips) onto the surfaces either side of the touchpad. Notice the change in sound / vibes? Well you get more than that with this mod, but it is of that basic nature. So you can try it out conceptually if you'd like. If you tap on the surface of the unibody after this mod…well it gives the impression of being more solid.

MBP 13, mid-2009, Seagate Momentus XT 750 gb hybrid.

Stanley said:

Hey I noticed some folks notice or dislike (or read about online and then notice and dislike

) that 7200 rpm hard drives are noisier and vibrate more than the stock 5400s. It's not that big a deal.

You can cut this down quite noticeably with some simple DIY efforts. I used some dynamat / roof patch sheet here and there. An example is shown below. Measured from the built-in mic and a metering app, I found this simple change helped by 3-8 dB (depending on frequency). That is significant. What is happening is that the aluminum unibody is acting like a sounding board driven by the vibes from the HD. The DIY panel dampening efforts deaden that energy. Some softer rubber pin mounts would help similarly. The HD floats in rubber bushings, four bushing pins in total. These are the screws that you exchange onto a new HD when you swap.

If you are running a 7200, try placing several fingers (not just the tips) onto the surfaces either side of the touchpad. Notice the change in sound / vibes? Well you get more than that with this mod, but it is of that basic nature. So you can try it out conceptually if you'd like. If you tap on the surface of the unibody after this mod…well it gives the impression of being more solid.

MBP 13, mid-2009, Seagate Momentus XT 750 gb hybrid.

Click to expand...

Thanks for this.
It pretty much makes sense. I have just ordered the xt 750, and if noise/vibration becomes a problem this will be the first route I will take to dampen it.
You sound a bit more experienced with doing DIY mods like this... would you mind consulting me and breaking down what I have to should I need any help, in the event that I decide to do this mod?

mt6272 said:

Thanks for this.
It pretty much makes sense. I have just ordered the xt 750, and if noise/vibration becomes a problem this will be the first route I will take to dampen it.
You sound a bit more experienced with doing DIY mods like this... would you mind consulting me and breaking down what I have to should I need any help, in the event that I decide to do this mod?

Click to expand...

Sure just let me know.

You are basically applying thick stickers here. Peel and stick. The material cuts with a scissor or exacto blade.

Buy "dynamat" ($$$$$) in the car stereo section of Best Buy or a small roll of roofing patch from the roofing area in Home Depot / Lowes ($). You need very little of it. Mine was 6 inches wide on a roll.

I used some of the extra material on my clunky clothes dryer. Now if you slam its door it sounds like a Mercedes!

Thanks Stanley, will be in contact.
I just received my momentus xt from amazon yesterday.

Now, I would like to install lion os x onto it; however, to put a clean version of the os on the drive, I understand that I have no option really besides purchasing lion from apple (i purchased my computer refurbished with lion already installed on it....)

I also understand that "cloning" is an option here. However, I am doubting that this is a good idea for this particular drive seeing as it is a hybrid. Correct me if I am wrong in making this assumption!

What other options do I have to get a clean (or at least relatively clean) install lion on my new hard drive without dropping $30 in to apple's wallet? I was thinking I could wipe my system clean while on this hard drive, and then do the clone. However, doesn't simply wiping my system clean also require me to have an apple account associated with the purchase of lion?

Note: I have only had this computer with this current hard drive for 1 month. Might this mean simply cloning onto the hybrid drive won't be that big of a deal? Tried googling this issue but found nothing satisfactory... perhaps nobody else is as big of a penny pincher as me.

mt6272 said:

Thanks Stanley, will be in contact.
I just received my momentus xt from amazon yesterday.

Now, I would like to install lion os x onto it; however, to put a clean version of the os on the drive, I understand that I have no option really besides purchasing lion from apple (i purchased my computer refurbished with lion already installed on it....)

I also understand that "cloning" is an option here. However, I am doubting that this is a good idea for this particular drive seeing as it is a hybrid. Correct me if I am wrong in making this assumption!

What other options do I have to get a clean (or at least relatively clean) install lion on my new hard drive without dropping $30 in to apple's wallet? I was thinking I could wipe my system clean while on this hard drive, and then do the clone. However, doesn't simply wiping my system clean also require me to have an apple account associated with the purchase of lion?

Note: I have only had this computer with this current hard drive for 1 month. Might this mean simply cloning onto the hybrid drive won't be that big of a deal? Tried googling this issue but found nothing satisfactory... perhaps nobody else is as big of a penny pincher as me.

Click to expand...

Cloning will work just fine if you don't wish to spring for the 29 bux. And after a month there would still be very little if any "degradation" from the then-clean install. The XT's hybrid nature does not affect cloning. It will learn what it needs to learn by your just using the Mac and restarting it a few times. I'm loving my 750 XT.

why would you want to save that $29 ? do yourself a favor get the lion osx, that is the best 29 bucks you will ever spent.
to steady your system and make sure your boot up time is fast and browsing is faster, than
install the osx clean on your mbp. I have been installing SSD on my 2 mbp, experience tell me to do a clean install. will do you good. just my opinion.

Sounds like I will be cloning indeed.

My only concern is that I will lose my recovery partition upon cloning. To your knowledge, is there any way to carry the recovery partition along when cloning to the new drive?
OR, am I simply over-valuing having a recovery partition? (I'm still learning about this stuff, but from what I hear it is nice to have if things go awry on your machine)

Any links that you could provide to step-by-step guides/videos in cloning (and cloning the recovery partition as well) that you know to be helpful for a person with minimal expertise on the topic? I see a lot of people say Carbon Copy Cloner is useful.....

carbon copy clone can be downloaded for free, it is simple just copy your internal hard drive to external enclosure contains your seagate drive.
clone over to external drive, then using osx lion thumb drive you have to either create one or buy one from apple, install your osx to the external drive, make sure it can be booted from external drive, then take the internal drive out replace with external one.

ycl1688 said:

carbon copy clone can be downloaded for free, it is simple just copy your internal hard drive to external enclosure contains your seagate drive.
clone over to external drive, then using osx lion thumb drive you have to either create one or buy one from apple, install your osx to the external drive, make sure it can be booted from external drive, then take the internal drive out replace with external one.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input.
To clarify, I should say that I would find it relatively easy to look up a guide on how to clone with CCC, and that perhaps information on how to do this is not specifically what I am seeking right now.

To rephrase what I would like to have help with/have answered:
I would like to know how to copy my primary partition AND my recovery partition to my new drive.
And for the sake of begin anxious to use my new drive, if I simply copy over my primary partition for now, will I still have the chance in the future to copy over my recovery partition?

No way I could express how thankful I am for all the help i've received on this thread so far. You guys are great.

mt6272 said:

Thanks for the input.
To clarify, I should say that I would find it relatively easy to look up a guide on how to clone with CCC, and that perhaps information on how to do this is not specifically what I am seeking right now.

To rephrase what I would like to have help with/have answered:
I would like to know how to copy my primary partition AND my recovery partition to my new drive.
And for the sake of begin anxious to use my new drive, if I simply copy over my primary partition for now, will I still have the chance in the future to copy over my recovery partition?

No way I could express how thankful I am for all the help i've received on this thread so far. You guys are great.

Click to expand...

start with simple step, forget about partition, make sure you have formated your drive to 'journaled', then clone it.

Managing the OS X 10.7 Lion restore drive | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

Seems like Google has all sorts of ideas. ;-)

Personally, I'd spend the 29, or not worry about corruption from using the puter for 30 days. I have done that and found no degradation issues. And a later fresh install was no faster. If you have a heavily used 2 year old Mac things might be different.

Thanks for the link Stanley. It definitely got me headed in the right direction.
On part of some heavy googling myself, I think I found out a much simpler way to accomplish my goal of cloning both my main and recovery partition.

Just a few lines of code in terminal and apparently I can recreate a recovery partition, even on a mac that never had one!

Removing and rebuilding a malfunctioning Recovery HD partition « Der Flounder

......Someone put this code into an automated script thingy to make things a touch easier, found here:
Musings » Restoring a lost Recovery Partition (Volume) in Lion

So, what i'll be doing is:
1) CCC cloning my main partition over to my new HD.
2) Then i'll run that script, and supposedly.. voila, i'll have my current setup completely transferred over, recovery HD and all.

If I am misreading anything about how easy this is going to be, give me a heads up! I'm quite excited with my find. I'll be following up here sharing my results in the next day or so.