Seagate Momentus XT Issues in a Mac

The Seagate Momentus XT is a good hybrid drive and it worked quite well with my MacBook Pro when I used it. (Before I upgraded to real SSD). However the computer seemed to be slower and I couldn't really understand why. Anyway I felt it was something related to the disk.

It seems like Seagate have its own kind of power-save mode for this drive and we cant override it. It also enters this powersave mode whenever it wants to so if you are browsing the web you may suddenly get a beachball for a few seconds because the drive needs some data and it needs to wait until it spins up.

The Solution:

Upgrading the drives firmware apparently haven't worked. However you should download hdapm. It will enable you to set the powersave options for this drive. It also fixes the annoying beacball problem...