I've got a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive that has done a great job since I bought it.
I've noticed that there's a lot of people on the internet complaining that their Momentus XT has tons of issues (freezes, weird noises, poor battery life), and Seagate have issued several firmware updates. The newest one is SD25. I'm still on SD22, the original firmware that shipped on the first production drives.
I haven't had these issues, although when I first bought it I did notice it audibly span up/down a lot, it stopped doing that after about a month. The SMART data for my drive shows that its had 4,513 power on hours, 1,095 power on cycles, 30,538 load cycles (!), and 36,222 start/stops (!) which seems to contradict that though, so maybe it has been spinning down, only doing so quietly so I didn't notice.
The start/stop and load cycle counts seem to suggest that the drive powers down once every 8 minutes, which seems excessive for its stay in two desktop replacement laptops which spend most of their time plugged in with Windows set to never spin down the hard drive.
Its rated for 600k start/stop cycles, but the SMART attribute already has a rating of 65. 2 months ago it only had 29k start/stop cycles. In two months its gained 7k start/stop cycles, compared to only 2k for the secondary drive.
Should I be worried about this?
Is it enough of a problem that I should be updating the firmware? (or should I just be thankful that I'm not having freezing issues and weird noises with my drive?)
Its a significantly higher amount of cycles per month than the other drive, but then again, its still going to take 15 years to hit the manufacturer's rated limit, so I'm not sure if its really something I should be worrying about, since by the time the warranty expires in 4 years I'll probably be using an SSD.
