Debriefing my update to Momentus XT firmware SD28, the process was a success. There were, however, some woes along the way of updating the firmware. Read more to see the whole journey.
For starters, I use the 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT in my MacBook 13-inch Late 2009 machine. This is a bit of an oddball in Macs, as it is one of only about two or three machines that purely uses the NVIDIA MCP79 chipset to power the entire system. The only Intel chip in this machine, is the Core 2 Duo CPU.
As such, the update process may differ starkly from other Mac models. For the previous SD24 and SD25 firmware updates, it was much more of a breeze than other Mac users, my Mac happily booted from the CD-R image, and ran the update.
One major configuration change that I made however was switching to a dual-drive configuration, with a SSD drive in the other drive bay, instead of my optical drive. Combined with FileVault 2’s EFI bootloader, my Mac decided it was not going to boot from the optical drive. At all. I couldn’t even boot a Windows install disc. Obviously, I’m going to be looking into that a bit more later.
But, realizing that firmware SD28 fixes a critical data corruption issue, I had to move to Plan B. Which, was to take my MacBook apart, and pull the hard drive out. I took it into a PC about seven feet away, and booted the install disc that I had just burned.
The entire install process took all of about two minutes. The firmware update downloaded to the drive without any issues, and I pulled the drive out of the PC, and put it back into the MacBook.
Then came the moment of truth: Would the MacBook boot from the drive with the updated firmware. If you read my most recent article on Momentus XT, you would know that with Momentus XT updates in the past this was no certain thing.
Thankfully, it booted fine. I am writing this post right from the drive, and haven’t had any issues with it since. It has passed a SMART self-test and I’m about to run a long drive self-test as well.
My biggest concern in the wake of the process is that Seagate continues to not have a Mac hard drive firmware update solution for their internal drives. Apple has the code to facilitate this; they have offered it on many Seagate and other HDD manufacturer-built drives when they shipped from the factory with this code. I implore Seagate and Apple to share the update binary for Mac so that Mac users can update any hard drive from inside Mac OS X. It does no goodwill to Apple to keep that code to themselves.
The lack of a Mac updater aside, the update hopefully, hopefully puts an end to Momentus XT’s woes, because the underlying technology is solid. It’s the best balance between the ideals of extremely-fast storage, and extreme capacity. I’m seriously afraid that the 1 TB version of the drive has been held up due to the marketing blunders that these firmware issues have caused. The only thing I can suggest to Seagate on that front is to give it a new marketing name, apart from Momentus XT…
… and to send me a review copy. I’d be happy to tear it apart and let people know it’s as solid as a standard hard drive.
Hi,
How to upgrade from sd 26 to sd 28?
I have followed the tutorial from io101 but no luck.
The resource is busy keeps popping up.
Any ideas?
I just upgraded my 500 GB XT from SD 25 to SD 28 (it originally came with SD 24). It might just be my imagination, but vibration and noise seem to have decreased somewhat and iStat nano registers a whopping decrease in temperature; it’s running at 36*, whereas usually I see it go anywhere from 53-59*. I could just be biased by hope for noise/vibration, but you can’t argue with iStat!
(Running in 15″ 2.4gHz i5 MBP, mid 2010)
Hi,
You say you took your HDD to a PC seven feet away.
I was about to do the same until I read the warning notice on the seagate PC update:
“Remove al external drives before proceedin”,
And “do not use to update a Raid array”.
Alarm bells rung as:
1 The HDD from my mac was in an external enclosure.
2 The PC has a Raid 0 as its system disk.
Does the Seagate software identify the disk to be updated?
Do you specifically select the disk to be updated?
Doe the seagate software update the disk you specify to update and only the disk you choose?
Having suffered with Seagate software on the MAC where Burnt 8 ISO disks 6 CD- R and 2 DVDs with no boot success. I tried the superdrive as an internal and external superdrive with no successful boot. I am less than confident that the Seagate software will be well behaved running on a PC, I have a complete backup of my MAC HDD, so I am more concerned that the software will not attempt any update of any of my PC disks.
I agree with your call for Seagate to write the code for direct execution on a Mac.
Perhaps if Seagate could be persuaded to look at number of MACs sold and and that they are at the premium end of the PC market, rather than overall market share, they may be persuaded that it is worthwhile to fully support he MAC as sales of premium HDD products such as the Momentus XT will more likely go to MAC and similar high end PCs, than to mass market IBM PCs?
I run SD28 on my Asus laptop, it might have solved the problems on your PC’s but it still beach balls on my computer making even surfing annoying as hell.
Guess im left with no choise but to buy an ssd and just give seagate a piece of my mind on the phone.