2Inside HDD LogoFix for problems with Seagate Momentus XT

I’ve had prob­lems with the new Seag­ate Momentus XT hard­drive in my new­est HTPCThe 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 SD28There are reports that this fixes sev­er­al issues and is a worth­while update.

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Ddanwat1234

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): momentus xt firm­ware

Boot­able iso ver­sion: seag­ate momentus xt firmware

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JSJon Scaife

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.”

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