I’ve had problems with the new Seagate Momentus XT harddrive in my newest HTPC. The PC was locking up every 48 hours or so (which may have been related to standby), was occasionally jerky, and upon reboot would often refuse to boot with an error about a missing boot device, which could only be fixed with a hard power cycle. There is a firmware update for the drive to SD25 but this didn’t resolve the issue. However, after I changed the power management settings in Windows 7 to never spin-down the harddrive, the problems all went away. Success!
Update (14-Sept-2011). Seagate has released firmware SD28. There are reports that this fixes several issues and is a worthwhile update.
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Here is the official Seagate Momentus XT SD26 firmware update. SD26 is the latest version of the drive’s firmware as of the end of August, 2011. If you search around, you will easily see that new Momentus XT drives are shipping with this version of the firmware, but Seagate isn’t making it easy to attain this firmware.
Windows version (easiest): http://www.sendspace.com/file/mhlkbf
Bootable iso version: http://www.sendspace.com/file/rifiz5
Thanks for these links Dan. However, I always advise a policy of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. As far as I can tell SD25 works fine, so unless someone is having a problem with it I would suggest keeping it for now. Seagate have chosen not to release SD26 as an update for some reason, according to their own forums the update to SD26 “addresses a very specific issue that we have not seen anybody report but besides that one thing it is no different than 25.”