I’d been looking at the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives for a while (with particular interest since I read the review from Anandtech), and now that I needed a new drive (and needed it faster than AppleCare was going to get it to me) – I headed on down to NCIX and picked one of those suckers up.

For those interested in such things, I picked up the 500GB model (ST95005620AS) for about $150.00. It came with firmware SD22 installed.

I could never be bothered to perform detailed benchmarking on stuff – that’s what reading Anandtech is for. But here are my two observations so far:

1. This drive is FAST
2. This drive is LOUD

Boot time is cut to about 1/3 of my previous, after a few boots to get the SSD portion of the drive warmed up. Launching apps (Firefox, Safari, Adium, Aperture, Mail, 1Password, etc.) is ridiculously fast. Often less than a single bounce for Safari.

For reference, it’s worth noting that these observations are now being made while I’m using a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel i7 / 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM) – when I first installed the drive it was in a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo / 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM). I could say the same about the older MacBook Pro. Very fast.

As I also mentioned, it’s loud. It’s extremely obvious that there is a drive spun up in the machine, much louder than any previous drive I’ve had in any of my previous MacBook or MacBook Pro’s.

Overall reviews (generally speaking) for the drive are hugely mixed. I read reviews from Amazon, Newegg and NCIX. There are a lot of people happy with the drive, and a lot of people unhappy with the drive. Common complaints include corrupt files (not sure if some of these people had any clue as to what they were talking about, or might have simply got a bad drive, which happens sometimes. Deal with it.), but the largest complaint seems to be with drive spin-down. Several people note that their drive spins down on a regular basis (e.g. every 25 minutes), and then their machine will beachball as they wait for it to spin-up again. Seagate seems to have released a firmware update (SD23) that supposedly addresses this.

Several people have also complained that they can’t get the firmware update to work. I hadn’t noticed any spin-down problems, but just for kicks I thought I’d try to update the firmware. I downloaded the ISO, burned it to a disk, rebooted, let it boot into whatever forsaken version of DOS they use, and within about 30 seconds I had new firmware installed without so much as a hiccup. So that’s my experience.

I haven’t decided for certain if I’ll keep the drive (although I’ll take a 15% hit from NCIX for a restocking fee), simply because of how loud it is. I might opt for the tried and true ‘normal’ Seagate Momentus until they have some of the kinks worked out, but I still have about 5 days to decide.

Greeted immediately by blaring music and a flash intro, with a site interior that wasn’t much better, I felt a bit traumatized. I couldn’t find a half decent list of past projects organized in a fashion that I could read, no gallery of past houses or developments. The entire site is in flash, limiting my ability to copy and paste, I honestly just couldn’t deal with it.

I’ve come across many such sites over the past few months, and it’s starting to grate on me. So I wrote them an email trying to provide some feedback. I took detailed screenshots, annotated them with Skitch, and sent it off.

Included below is the body of the email I sent, verbatim (if you want to see the site, you can view it yourself here):

Hi there,

I recently visited your web site while doing research – a realtor I met with recommended your homes to me.

Sadly – I have to say I find your web site completely unusable. I’d love to provide some feedback:

1) Flash is a very poor technology choice for any web site
a) It is not accessible
b) There are serious navigation problem with the back button
c) There is no way for someone to highlight, or copy and paste text
d) Music on web sites is agitating – and it takes control away from
the users viewing your site
e) “Flash Intros” serve as a distraction for users. They waste your
visitors valuable time by forcing them to wait through it, or spend the time and effort finding and clicking through to “Skip” the intro before actually getting to the content on your site.

2) Properly formed HTML markup and CSS based layouts (one of the technologies used to build standards compliant, modern web sites) drastically increase your search engine rankings, and have been the de facto standard for web technology for years – fully flash-based sites are almost exclusively the domain of the entertainment industry at this point, and even there, I believe, it is a poor choice.

3) Even the company logo on the site is poorly pixellated, and not crisp and sharp.

4) Your navigation doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why is “Private Entrance” a navigation item? What does it mean?

5) Your portfolio page offers no easy to view hierarchy of your current or past projects. There is no nice, easy to browse photo gallery, no project overviews unless I start scrolling through a huge text field that is filled with rectangles that don’t make any sense.

6) There is absolutely no consistency to your typography and font choices whatsoever. The site flows from Serif, to Sans Serif to handwriting to italics and back again.

I apologize for all the negative feedback, but I hope that you’re able to utilize some of it in the development of a more user-centric and user friendly site. The web is about user experience – and companies really need to be able to deliver a positive, pleasant and refreshing experience to potential customers and investors. I felt invaded when I came to your web site – without coherent content or navigation, inconsistent text and audio that kept blaring at me. It made me want to leave as soon as possible.

If you require assistance with any of this – I’d be more than happy to help – or I could make several recommendations of other excellent web designers and developers who could help create a truly remarkable experience for your customers and clients.

Warmest Regards,

-daniel

I received two emails in response. One was from someone whom I’m assuming is the webmaster for the site, thanking me for my detailed feedback. He also indicated that they’ve received a tremendous amount of very positive feedback on the site, and that my feedback provides a bit of balance.

Following that, I received this email, from a Mr. Brian Horn of Fine Line Calgary whose contact information can be found here. I include his email, verbatim, below:

Hey Daniel,
Or whatever your name is, you are a coward, why not just be honest and sell people your product honestly, Yours is a very slimy way of approaching people.

Don’t contact me again , I don’t deal with slimeball salesman.

Brian Horn.

I don’t take well to people calling me a coward and a salesman, mostly because neither are true. I take my reputation and my integrity very seriously. I replied to Mr. Horn with this email:

Hi Brian,

I take tremendous offense to your accusations. I was genuinely trying to provide honest feedback for your site. I’ve run a software consulting company in Vancouver for the past 6 years, and I’ve lived and breathed the Internet and software development industries for more than 10.

I don’t have any interest in selling you anything, simply providing feedback that you can independently verify and pursue as you see fit.

I’m also extremely confused as to the hostility, as I visited the Castleview site specifically as an investor looking to find information on and potentially purchase homes.

You won’t hear from me again.

Warm Regards,
-daniel

The sad thing about this is that I had no interest personally in rebuilding or somehow earning money from Castleview Homes (or whoever) from this site. But as an investor or customer, I wanted a site to go to where I could view cohesive information about this builder, their past projects and the type of work they do. Given that I didn’t receive any of that, my intention was to offer assistance, and put them in touch with any one of a dozen people I know who could help them build a better experience for their customers and users. Instead, I’m called a coward and slimeball.

Looking back at my email now, maybe I was a bit gruff, and my words were a bit strong – but I don’t think it makes them any less true.

Maybe I’m a slimeball after all. Neat.

Our data center client lists reads like a who’s who of Calgary businesses. Are you in it?

Marketing like this has always bothered me. It makes me want to flip the bird in their general direction, because climbing past the drivel it reads like this:

If you’re not hosting in our data center your company sucks.

Peer pressure for the enterprise. I thought we got past that in tenth grade?

Note to Q9 (this one’s free): Hire better marketing people.