This is a story about upgrading the firmware of a hard disk. Please understand that if you decide to upgrade the firmware of a hard disk, you can brick your hard disk.
Before attempting to upgrade the firmware of a hard disk be sure to back up your data and prove you can restore it. After all, if things go wrong you many need to restore to a new hard disk.
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So, the other night I'm bored out of my mind. To pass the time I decided to roam around the Internet and upgrade the drivers on a Toshiba Portege R700 that I use for schoolwork. The only upgrade I've performed to the machine is replace the small, slow OEM hard disk with a large, fast Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB hybrid HDD. The laptop runs Windows 7 Professional and I make considerable use of VMware Workstation. I'm not sure that the Seagate Momentus XT is worthy of "gee whiz, that's cool!" but I can say that when it reads stuff in the cache it does speed up the machine. The bummer, of course, is that the Momentus XT is basically a 7200 rpm hdd most of the time. All those disk writes are written to disk the old fashioned way.
To update the laptop's drivers I went to the support sites for Microsoft, Toshiba, and Intel. The drivers from those companies were all current. For grins I decided to look at the support site for the Seagate Momentus XT hard drive. While there I discovered Seagate had released a firmware upgrade for the Momentus XT hard disk. What I didn't know then is that by upgrading the firmware of the hard disk I would become part of The Saga of the Seagate Momentus XT Firmware Upgrade.
Way back in December 2010, when I purchased my Momentus XT, the hard disk was provisioned with firmware release SD23. Apparently, something didn't work out quite right with that software. To fix whatever problems were annoying the user base, in December 2010 Seagate announced the release of firmware SD24. Unfortunately, the announcement occurred without much fanfare or the publication of release notes.
Well, as these things go, SD24 was great for a bunch of users, but actually made things worse for others. In February 2011, ComputerWorld.com ran a story called "Users frustrated with Seagate's next-gen hybrid drive." This story really brought to light the fact that the combination of the Momentus XT drive in certain hardware configurations resulted in a laggy machine with reliability issues. StorageReview.com apparently had a good experience with SD24 because in March 2011 StorageReview.com ran a positive review of SD24. To be honest, I never upgraded the firmware on my Momentus XT from SD23 to SD24.
I don't know what was wrong with SD24, but Seagate took the complaints about SD24 seriously enough to release an update at the end of March 2011. The new firmware carried the unimaginative name "SD25." Again, Seagate did not publish release notes with the new firmware so no one really knew what bugs were fixed or functions improved.
This is where I came into the story. Completely oblivious to the firestorm of complaints directed at Seagate regarding the Momentus XT, I blithely followed the directions posted at Momentus XT Firmware Update [215451].
The actual upgrade process went flawlessly. I followed the directions in the firmware update and downloaded Seagate's Drive Detect software. This software confirmed I had the right type of Momentus XT hard disk, but oddly it did not recommend an upgrade from SD23 to SD25. In fact, Drive Detect suggested I keep the firmware at SD23.
Having gotten the "go code" from Drive Detect (eh, well, sort of), I downloaded and ran the SD25 firmware update utility. Talk about a slick little upgrade! The update process exited Windows, rebooted the laptop and entered its upgrade environment. After a couple of minutes the word "SUCCESS" appeared on the screen and the computer rebooted back into Windows.
To be sure, according to the forum posts at Seagate, other machines did not fair well with their update to SD25. In my case, my Portege R700 seems to have survived the update OK. The time needed to boot up remains about 40 seconds. I have noticed the system's fan is on much more frequently and at higher rpm. That makes no sense to me at all. However, what has decreased is the time needed to boot VMware virtual machines. There is a noticeable increase in responsiveness. I wouldn't go back to SD23.
For me, applying firmware revision SD25 to my Seagate Momentus XT was a worthy (if risky) upgrade. Best of luck to you should you decide to upgrade the firmware in your Seagate Momentus XT.
