Recently upgraded my laptop to an SSD after using a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB drive for over a year and a half. The XT is a wonderful drive: it is a hybrid drive, combining storage of a 7200-RPM disk with speed of a small SSD, all in a normal 2.5″ hard drive form-factor. It actually uses the SSD as a type of cache, so it appears as one drive. Much faster than a typical 7200-RPM drive. I like it so much, than as I’ve bought new laptops, I’ve always moved it to the new machine, selling the “new” hard drive in the old laptop.

Well, I jumped up as high as I could go, finally springing for a 512 GB SSD. I wanted to do a clean OS install, and just copy files over from the XT, by putting the XT in an external enclosure. Typically with 2.5″ drives the power consumption is such that you can use a USB powered external enclosure. Not so for the XT. When I put it in the enclosure (NexStar SX) the drive started beeping. Thought it was the enclosure, but turns out it was the drive. I then tried jury rigging the drive with a Western Digital MyBook interface (it took a fall, breaking the enclosure, but the circuitry and the drive itself work great). For whatever reason, that didn’t work either, though no beeping (perhaps that interface is designed to only work with WD drives)

I ended up putting the XT back in my laptop, doing a full backup of it, and now I’m restoring off of that backup.

Turns out the SSD part of the XT requires a bit more power to start the drive than a normal 2.5″ drive. So if you want to use it in an external enclosure, you’ll need either a powered one (use a 3.5″ enclosure) or if your 2.5″ enclosure doesn’t support external power, you can use a USB cable that draws from multiple USB ports. See http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/Momentus-XT-500go-as-an-external-mass-storage-experience-and/td-p/88486